Review of Molly Grad's 'Invisible modes' show, curated by Jenn Ellis and presented by Apsara Studio

Walking into Molly Grad's exhibition at The Florence Trust, curated by Jenn Ellis and presented by Apsara Studio, I felt as though the city itself had spilt indoors. Imaginary dirt seemed to crawl across the grey floor and white walls. The gallery, once a church and now a white-cube art space, held a strange tension. Heavy, industrial sculptures were spaced out enough to breathe, but their looming presence made the absence of human bodies all the more palpable. These objects – harsh, utilitarian – began to resemble shoes over time, evoking a quiet metaphor: walking in someone else's shoes. But no one was walking. No bodies, just the shells.

That saying, "to walk in someone else's shoes," becomes central to Molly's work. It's a phrase that exists in many cultures, yet it is often ignored in practice. Her sculptures, stark and empty, asked me to engage with empathy as something that's not just symbolic but spatial. Set against the backdrop of a former place of worship, the works gain a deeper resonance. I thought not only about the roles we inhabit but the ones we choose to overlook – especially when those roles involve labour, care, and sacrifice.

This theme of visibility – or rather, invisibility – runs through the exhibition. In the first room, metal plates covered with photographs of Molly herself and her friend with a child, dressed in high-visibility clothing, present artist's performative part of her practice when interacting with the work of road workers and construction crews. These are the men we see every day but rarely look at. They build an integral part of the city's constant transformation, the scaffolding that we rush past without pause. Molly's observation that we only notice these changes when buildings are stripped down – when the "metal skeletons" are exposed – is both simple and profound. We don't notice the workers either, just as we don't notice the women not doing that work.

And that's where Molly turns the lens back on herself. Wearing the same reflective overalls, she walks around the city with her children. A mother dressed like a worker – yet her labour remains invisible. No vest marks her care as worthy of attention. Her performance is quiet, but it speaks volumes. It draws a parallel between construction and care: both are physical, both are transformative and yet only one is typically acknowledged in public space. Through this gesture, she blurs the gendered boundaries of labour, gently exposing the imbalance between seen and unseen effort.

Her paintings, too, reward careful looking. Manholes – those overlooked features beneath our feet – slowly emerge in paintings. Only once we understand what she's referencing do their outlines become clear. Even the term "manhole" is questioned. Why man-hole? What does that naming exclude or overlook? These linguistic choices reflect the same kind of blind spots she's trying to expose visually and socially.

Ultimately, Molly's work compels us to look again—at what's in front of us, under us, and around us. She doesn't shout; she gestures. The silence of the white walls, the ghostly shoes, the absence of bodies—all of it makes us lean in. In a world of oversaturation, she's asking for attention, not noise. She's asking us to notice what we've learned to ignore.