The Overshare

Every aspect of my professional and personal experience in the art world is based on collaboration. As an artist I work in collage—I use other people’s creative and editorial content to create fresh visuals and new narratives. As a curator I am organizing, facilitating, and promoting the work of other artists and venues. I do the same as a publisher. And as an art business consultant I’m working closely with artists, studios, and galleries, helping them solve problems and reach goals. Collaboration and organization are two of my favorite things, but I don’t think they are necessarily what first comes to mind when people think of the art world. Often one collaboration leads to another and another—it’s a wonderful virtuous circle that I love.

In the summer of 2017 I decided to publish a newspaper, which I named FULL BLEDE, a play on the printing terms “full bleed” (printing to beyond the edge of the page) and the journalism jargon “lede” (the introductory section of a news story that entices the reader to keep reading). Issue One was my contribution to a group exhibition featuring work by employees of The Broad museum, who were also artists. The show was a follow up to one that I had co-organized the year before, but this time around I decided to step away from the behind the scenes work and just participate as an artist. But funnily enough, my concept for contributing was still all about organization and collaboration. 

My plan was to publish a broadsheet and have the inaugural issue feature work by The Broadies (as we called ourselves). Each issue would have a theme (this was not to be a one-off project, rather I imagined it to be the beginning of something, which indeed became the case) and for Issue One it would be The Overshare: exploring the thrill, embarrassment, and disdain of sharing too much information. 

Surprisingly, when I put out the call, I received less work than I imagined—I guess my co-workers were a bit more private or reserved than I perceived. As my printing deadline loomed, the layout was basically done, but I was struggling with what to put on some prime real estate: the back cover. I decided to look beyond museum employees to artists I knew and admired and whose work would fit the t.m.i. bill. My friend Molly Segal’s paintings immediately came to mind. Her watercolors were often highly provocative, personal scenes—groups of naked people having sex in a dystopian landscape, for example, or hyenas with bloody mouths and a naked woman on an unmade bed. Yes, this work would do perfectly. 

I reached out and we had a studio visit. While we were looking and talking about the work, it was in the context of the theme. Almost immediately we both agreed on a stunning larger than life self portrait: Scab Picker, 2017, an 87 x 60 inch watercolor and gouache on Yupo paper that she had just recently finished. In the painting the artist sits naked on dirt, her knees bent and legs widespread, leaning against a giant cactus, her left elbow resting casually on a prickly cladode, exposing her breasts. Her gaze looks straight ahead, at the viewer, unflinching. It’s a shocking painting. Loosely rendered in her signature style, the figure looks relaxed but also there is a sense of defiance or perhaps even a dare. She is impervious to the spines of the cactus, which we can imagine are penetrating her skin as it surrounds her like a throne.

I asked Molly if she would write a short paragraph about the work, to be published in The Overshare. Here’s what she submitted: “I think oversharing or radical honesty is really important to the kind of work I want to make. I can often tell when I’m close to something really rich in the studio when the thought of making it makes me a tiny bit queasy. There’s a thrill in jumping off a cliff and feeling vulnerable. And the more you do it, the more seems possible. But it never stops being uncomfortable. This painting is a good example of that. It makes me squirm to be in a room with people looking at this gigantic splayed, naked self portrait. But I made it. And I offered it to share. And the woman in the painting (who is me) is relaxed and unbothered within that discomfort.”

This issue of FULL BLEDE became the beginning of a rewarding creative collaboration with Molly. It was the first of ten issues I published and each had her work featured on the back cover. I pretty much immediately came to see her contribution to the newspaper as essential—her marks on the back were as expected as the masthead on the front. Over a period of two years there has been a rotting, beached whale; an orgy of naked bodies in the shadow of a tractor and mound of debris; a couple holding hands with no faces, the watery edges of where there bodies touch blending into one another; a giant wild and prickly thistle plant growing out of an animal carcass; another self portrait, this one with naked Molly between two hyenas, her arms around their shoulders like they are her children. In each case she also wrote a few sentences about the work. Not only is she unafraid to share her visual interpretations of intimacy, vulnerability, connection, and interdependence, but also her thoughts.

I know this firsthand not just from the newspaper’s back pages of artist’s statements, but delicious and deliriously fun and sometimes a bit much evenings of getting together. Occasionally this happened at art openings around Los Angeles, but my favorite encounters were spontaneous meetups after our work days. Pre-pandemic my loft in the Arts District was just a couple blocks away from Molly’s studio. We would get together and meet at a nearby wine bar for drinks, nosh, and funny, intense talking sessions. The shock of radical honesty in Molly’s paintings is also true of our conversations over glasses of Sancerre. They were intimate and sometimes brutal. She doesn’t hold back and gets to a place that may feel squirmy and uncomfortable pretty quick. Vulnerability and the intimacy of relationships and situations in our lives comes to the surface in all conversations. 

She consistently also wrote about these emotions and states of being in my newspaper. Writing on the self portrait with the hyenas she observed: “This painting came from one of those precious, fleeting artistic periods where the work is just puking out of you faster than you can process what you are making or why. I had been dealing with a lot of predatory creatures, specifically hyenas in my work. I’d been operating under the impression that these were sort of one to one stand-ins for men, and my fears and insecurities around men. It was right around this painting that I realized that the hyenas were much more nuanced and intimate than that. That this Ugly lived inside of me. That these predators represented my own internalized misogyny and personal darkness as much as any reaction to an outside force.”

I included another large-scale, provocative painting by Molly, Drought Tolerance, 2017, in a group exhibition I curated at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles titled “IT’S OK. ↘” in 2018. In this work Molly and a friend are facing each other as they squat to pee on a dirt patch, surrounded by spiny thistles and weeds. In the show I was exploring mutability—the profound process of adaptation, eschewing any shame. Again Molly’s work fit the bill. The show coincided with the launch party of FULL BLEDE Issue Four, and of course, Molly’s work was on the back cover.

The newspaper has been on hiatus during the pandemic, and I truly miss the interactions with its contributors, including studio visits and correspondence, as well as the tremendous task of putting all the elements together to create an issue. Recently I was asked to contribute to a catalog on the event of Molly’s solo exhibition, organized by Luna Anais and on view at Wonzimer in downtown Los Angeles. I immediately said yes, eager to be involved in a publication and to work with the team and Molly once again. 

I thought I would write something on the casual side, about our friendship and my relationship with both her and the work. But of course, there is nothing casual about being friends with Molly or about her work. Both are intensity. Thinking of how to begin, I instead began to yearn for our in-person, wine infused rap sessions. I had not seen her face to face for over a year. I invited her to come over for a very cautious, windows wide open, masks on, sitting far away from each other visit to my new place downtown. The door opened, she walked in, sat down, and it was immediately just like old times. We both got deep and poked under our respective armour. 

At the end of our date she revealed she’s looking forward to getting back into the studio after the stressors of the pandemic year, working on non creative projects, and putting the Marrow Sucker show together. She said she planned on creating with no stakes involved, a favorite space to work in. I understood this feeling of creating without pressures or deadlines, but I also think that in Molly’s case there are always stakes. The work digs deep even if it’s not her initial intent. 

Over the years, since I first met her nearly a decade ago, Molly has commented about revealing too much information—in her work, in conversations, at parties, to friends and strangers alike. This is exactly the essence of her completely disarming and totally welcomed charm: getting to her truth and getting you to speak to yours. It has been my profound pleasure to work (and have glasses of Sancerre) with her over the years in our ongoing art world collaboration.

Sacha Halona Baumann
March 2021

An abridged version of this essay appeared in Molly Segal: Marrow Sucker, an exhibition catalog published by Luna Anais Gallery.