BareBones 2020 · OFFERINGS: Artists Respond to the Mourning, Grieving and Fires on Lake Street

MollieRae Miller

Cotton Thoughts

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Cotton Thoughts are many long narrow tapestries printed or stenciled with poems, thoughts, and questions that creator MollieRae Miller wrote and dated in a daily journal during and after quarantine and the protests surrounding the police killing of George Floyd.

“The tapestries are caught in the movement and conditions of their surroundings, physically. Mentally they represent how we process and learn from our reactions and thoughts that happen immediately—then how we see them again after time passes. As our impeding and repeating inner thoughts fade or return within our changing mental states of fear, love, worry, fight vs. flight, and calm,” noted MollieRae.

photos: Paul Irmiter, except where noted.

In the recent OFFERINGS: BareBones Live Pop-ups: Cotton Thoughts hung in the window display facing E. Lake St, near the merchant Mostapha at the Midtown Global Market. Oct. 31 to Nov. 7, 2020.

About the Artist

MollieRae Miller creates art that pushes together the puzzle pieces of the rural versus concrete lifestyles, while stripping inspirations down to pure shape, color, and texture and draws on her early influences of a childhood in Minnesota’s North Woods.

MollieRae graduated with a Fine Arts degree in 2017, and has been pursuing painting since she was a child. With passions for theater, history, architecture, and psychology most of her art holds underlying symbolism referencing personal religious or emotional states of mind. The action in her paintings can be seen in the gestural and energized brush strokes, the exaggerated 3-D presence on a canvas, and in the contrast of significantly bright color choices.

With an appreciation of the materials, the broader the spectrum of medium, the better. Recently, she has been focusing on the use of cotton soaked in acrylic paint which is then pasted to the canvas to create texture and dynamic. Stencil printing onto canvases has symbolism in the use of repetition. 3-D structures soaked in acrylic on the canvas create unique relief sculptures. Sgraffito styles also give a personal touch to her works.

​Living in Minneapolis for seven years has flooded MollieRae with an obsession for experiences as well as smothered her in questions about how the people around her participate with their own perceptions. She invites people to consider what they are looking at in everyday life can be considered as art or as inspiration. This is relevant in personal emotions and actions.