Robert Nichols Gallery presented 34 basins designed specifically for the gallery. Divided between adjoining walls, two groups of pots opposing each other like the matières in the title, taken from the French singer MC Solaar. A direct translation is “fat content versus grey matter”. Though MC Solaar uses the newfound phrase to describe dialectics of race, class, and culture, Molanphy glommed onto it as an oxymoron suggesting the simultaneous distinction and indeterminacy of the visceral and the cerebral. The basins were produced during a residency at the Alberta College of Art & Design (ACAD). Molanphy plays with the place of content in double-walled, inflated, or crushed pots with little or no containing space. Dimensions vary from seven to seventeen inches. One group is stoneware with bone, wood, and soda ashes. The other is polished black stoneware.
2009, Robert Nichols Gallery, Santa Fe, NM