“I am a painter, most days. Text and sculpture allow me to assert, to demand, to be direct and maybe radical.”
Luca Molnar, born in Budapest, came all the way from Florida to spend two months with us in aqb to continue an ongoing series of monochromatic paintings that use color as a framework to explore intersecting histories. “By combining abstracted patterns with historical imagery, I hope to give form to the overlapping, networked reference key to my own process of situating my identity in the context of these histories. This painting began at Baker-Miller pink, a color theorized in the 1960s by psychologist Alexander Schauss to have a calming effect. This hypothesis was first tested on incarcerated people by its namesakes, two prison directors. It more recently re-entered public consciousness after Kendall Jenner painted a room of her house this color because of its supposed effect as an appetite suppressant. References in the painting grew to include: First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, who is often credited with popularizing pink for women, in her pink inauguration gown; Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who rose to infamy because of his racist immigration patrols, posed with the pink boxers he forced men incarcerated at "Tent City" to wear; Kentucky medical students engaged in a dissection in the late 1800s when grave robbing, particularly of Black bodies, was on the rise to supply medical schools with bodies; and a line from Buck v. Bell, a 1927 US Supreme Court decision allowing for compulsory sterilization of the "mentally unfit"--a ruling which still stands. The state's spheres of power extend through the carceral, medical, psychological, and judicial in ways keenly felt by women in the last month.”