In her third solo exhibition at pt. 2 Gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Molly Bounds invites viewers into a hazy terrain of memory, evidence, and misrecognition. Transmissions unfolds like a murky investigation where personal history becomes fragmented and intuition sends mixed signals. Bounds uses the idea of receiving signals—radio frequencies, premonitions, visions, and signs—as a framework for navigating the thin line between fact and fiction, reality and projection. Is it safe to be open to “receiving”?
Steeped in atmosphere and unease, Bounds’ paintings feature faces turned away or obscured—figures seen through a shifting lens—somewhere between serenity and suspicion. Shadows stretch across domestic interiors and landscapes alike, warping time and point of view. Drawing from a family history of detective work and mysticism, Bounds poses a psychic landscape that feels as much like a dreamy hallucination as it does a crime scene.
Sculptural elements function as a genealogical museum exposing familial methods of reasoning spanning generations —past and present totems from a lineage of intuition and spying. A gardening glove cast in iron, grandfather’s binoculars, nanny’s magnifying glass, a dowsing rod: each object holds mythologized significance, pulled from family history and speculative fiction alike. These works blur the line between imparted facts and fabricated drama, conjuring a case file assembled from half-truths, heirlooms, and imagined threats.
Bounds explores the idea of hyperstition—fictions that become real simply by being believed—suggesting that worst-case scenarios, once imagined, can shape perception, behavior, and even reality itself. In Dead Ringer, a prophecy becomes a powerful (and possibly dangerous) form of creation. A peephole portrait of her sister in a state of ease invites an air of deviance or danger. Can simply asking, “what could go wrong?” invite turmoil? In A Rock That Says No (Pink Light), Bounds references Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis—his sprawling, handwritten archive of visions and theories sparked by a revelatory experience in 1974. The work’s esoteric logic and obsessive detail echo throughout the exhibition, contributing to a destabilized narrative that flirts with both madness and revelation, delirium and spiritual inheritance.
By casting the viewer as the observer—always slightly removed—Bounds stages a quiet kind of paranoia: in a world where genius and psychosis share a line of connection, can a gut feeling be trusted?