For many happy years, Molly and Ryan were my neighbors. To give you a sense of their style, a while back they brought home a beautiful, petite and anxious rescue dog named Stella. One of my fondest memories of the trio is seeing them at a distance walking together in the neighborhood. Something unexpected would happen and Stella would bark. Always, Molly and Ryan’s response was the same. They would lean down and say something gentle to their small friend, and all would be well. If called upon to draw an image of patience and kindness a tableau of the three of them in silhouette would be what I’d try to sketch.
Molly is an artist whose work can be seen at Molly C. Meng. I’m especially a fan of her cards. I suppose greeting cards is the conventional name for what I’m talking about, but I don’t think that really works in Molly’s case since she is a purveyor of sly entertainment – of complex ideas expressed in compact images.
In the 60s Marshall McLuhan proposed that the way that an idea is expressed conveys a message that is more significant than the content of the idea. In other words, I might employ a Google search to learn the answer to a particular question. And though the answer I obtain might seem important to me in the moment, what’s more important is the implications for my life of the fact that I can secure answers in that way. The implications for my life is the message, but I can only receive that message if I look beyond the immediate answer I receive and contemplate how my life is changed by being able to secure answers in that way.