Material Resistance

The texture of the landscape, our bodies, and our lives is hewn in response to gravity, friction, and pressure. In bringing together the work of Molly Moldovan and Kelly O’Neill, Material Resistance explores these physical and metaphysical tensions as a metaphor for loss, identity, and resilience. 

Molly Moldovan is a visual artist whose practice spans abstraction, sculpture, installation, and painting. A second-generation Canadian and the daughter of holocaust survivors, she is based in Apsley, Ontario. Heavily influenced by place, her work is informed by the changeable beauty of her surroundings at the edge of the Canadian Shield. Moldovan graduated with honours in Fine Art, Drawing and Painting, from the Ontario College of Art (now OCADU) in 1991 and received a post-graduate certificate through the Studio Process Advancement program at Haliburton School of Art and Design in 2014. Alongside her art practice, Moldovan serves as lead curator and Board member for the Art Gallery of Bancroft and is a founder and participant of the Apsley Autumn Studio Tour. She previously served as Secretary of the Board of the Art Gallery of Peterborough from 2006-2012. Moldovan has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across Ontario and beyond. Notable projects include The Democracy Project, Art Gallery of Peterborough (2004) and Impact Aids: 10 years of Broken Promises, Rebecca Gallery, Toronto (2006). She is a recipient of the Peterborough County award for Leadership in Arts and Culture and has received several Best in Show awards.

Kelly O’Neill is an installation, mixed media, and fibre artist living and working in Selwyn, Ontario. Her process and material driven practice engages with found objects, natural materials, video, assemblage, and textile traditions that consider the fluidity and impermanence of the human experience. O’Neill holds a BA in Philosophy and English Literature and worked as a social worker before taking on the job of full-time mother to four children. Having maintained an art practice throughout her life, she later returned to school to complete a BFA in Sculpture and Installation at the Ontario College of Art & Design University in 2018. Her professional experience includes residencies and work as an art juror, committee member, curator, and community art project facilitator, O’Neill’s work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada including Art Mur in Montreal; Nuit Blanche, 1313, and J.B. Aird Gallery in Toronto; Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge; Pendulum Gallery in Vancouver; and WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay. Her work has also been featured in several notable exhibitions and projects at Artspace, Erring at King George, and the Art Gallery of Peterborough.