Valerie Molnar and Matthew Spahr want to make plants happy, and will try almost anything to do it.
Valerie Molnar and Matthew Spahr want to make plants happy, and will try almost anything to do it.
Having successfully rehabilitated house plants as part of an installation at 1708 Gallery last June, the two Richmond-based artists are taking their unique fusion of art and gardening on the road with the help of an $8,000 grant that the two recently received from the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s Fellowship Program.
The Visual Arts Fellowship will allow the pair to expand the vision for their upcoming two-week residency at the Wave Pool gallery in Cincinnati, in which they’ll build on what they did in their People via Plants show at 1708 last year.
10 x 10 Week 1: People Via Plants from 1708 Gallery on Vimeo.
The fellowships were established in 1940 and intended to support both professional artists and students who “demonstrate exceptional creative ability in their chosen discipline,” according to the VMFA’s press release. But for Molnar and Spahr, this isn’t your garden variety fellowship. The grant comes with few creative strings, affording the artists the freedom to use the money as they see fit to achieve their vision, rather than limiting their ability to change direction or improvise.
“One thing that we love is that it’s super open, so it’s affording us to do all of the things that we had always been hoping to do, but were waiting for time and resources for,” Molnar said. “This is an amazing resource to just let us go ahead and get the things done that we want to get done.”
The two met in grad school at VCU but became friends as instructors there, first working individually but in close contact with one another before deciding to truly collaborate over four years ago.
“We started with bringing our work together and having it flirt with each other in the same place,” Spahr said. “And then slowly it became much more inter-meshed and no longer symbiotic but fused. Our collaboration came out of friendship so the conversational aspect was already there.”
The two say their respective skill sets complement each other well, particularly in their work with plants, to which Molnar brings her impressive gardening acumen and Spahr his construction expertise.
“Val has one of the greenest thumbs I’ve ever seen,” Spahr said. “She’ll come into someone’s office or home and diagnose what they’re doing wrong with their houseplants within a fraction of a second. And I was working with plants before Val and I started working together and I was killing a lot of plants so absorbing that skill set was kind of important to me.”
And according to Molnar, Spahr can build anything.
“For me it’s like all of these things that I never thought to want to do now we can do a lot more stuff together,” she said.
For People via Plants, the artists took in ailing houseplants from the community and rehabilitated them with traditional gardening techniques and knowledge of the plant and its needs as well as more creative approaches, from experimenting with new lighting techniques to playing music for them to inviting the audience to exercise in the gallery, creating helpful humidity.
The artists had both worked with plants before but had, at times, been using them in ways that were harmful.
“A lot of the impetus for this body of work came from maybe having plants in situations that were not ideal,” Spahr said. “And both of us feeling tremendously burdened by using something to make art in a way that was damaging to that. So the underlying motivation is to try to benefit those things.”
Molnar and Spahr will do something similar when they go to Cincinnati in July, aiming to make the plants happy. Science, pseudoscience and performative techniques will all be applied.
“We’re thinking about what [the plants] are missing from the outside and how we can bring that into them so they can be houseplants and still have all of the creature comforts of being an outdoor plant,” Molnar said.
Both artists said the VMFA is an invaluable institution for Richmond, both educationally and culturally. And the freedom afforded by the fellowship has benefitted Richmond artists for a long time.
“To me it’s almost unheard of for an institution like the VMFA to just hand artists money and trust that they’re going to use it for their practice,” Spahr said. “Normally there’s a contingency, there are contracts. The amount of freedom and trust that they’ve put into the hands of artists in Richmond for years is kind of priceless.”
