Molly Valentine Dierks

The Tender Hand of the Unseen is an immersive video installation, reconfigured recordings of starling murmurations. The work is titled after a poem (‘On Pain’) by Kahlil Gibran from his book 'The Prophet', that contemplates the nature of larger forces at work in our evolution. The work is my way of confronting a socially fractured landscape, where screens more frequently mediate our understanding of self… overshadowing more embodied connections to each other and the natural world. Projected on a clocktower, The Tender Hand of the Unseen also muses on the nature of time. Through the lens of starlings' beautiful sculptural patterns, the projection references periods of growth and rebirth...temporality more mutable than mechanical, circular than linear.

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About the Artist

Through immersive installations that draw equally from nature and technology, artist-designer Molly Valentine Dierks explores evolving landscapes of intimacy, distance, and connection.

Dierks has participated in exhibitions nationally (Dallas, Detroit, LA) and internationally (Russia, South Korea); including with the University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, and 500X Gallery in Dallas (among others). Select pieces have been featured in 'Post Industrial Complex', CICA Museum’s Art Yellow Book, Designboom, Voyage Dallas, The Jealous Curator, Peripheral Visions Arts and more. As a public artist and designer (with installations in Detroit, Minnesota, Dallas, Fort Worth, South Korea), she utilizes the material vocabulary of signs, mass-production and construction to find waysof ‘being’ within systems of labor. Through grant support, Dierks has participated in residencies nationally and internationally (Finland, Japan, Iceland, China, Korea), translating the poetry of her experiences through new and evolving series of work.