EAST HOLLYWOOD
Molly Segal
As We Grind Our Teeth To Dust
January 24 - March 14, 2026
Opening reception: Saturday, January 24, 6-9pm
A Summer Afternoon In Los Angeles. 2025. Water media and salt on paper. 41 x 30".
Track 16 presents As We Grind Our Teeth To Dust, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Molly Segal, which commences with a reception on Saturday, January 24th from 6-9pm and continues through March 14th. This is Segal’s second solo show at Track 16.
“I don’t know how to make art about fascism, so I paint the flowers instead as I grind my teeth to dust,” begins Molly Segal’s artist statement for her upcoming exhibition. The struggle of art’s relevance in dangerous times is ever present in Segal’s mind and paintings. In As We Grind Our Teeth To Dust, she presents works on paper centering on quiet, overlooked moments found in the recesses of city streets–all while asking “When does this moment call for more?”
Her watercolors, made gritty by the use of salt, depict in loving detail weeds bursting from the concrete, a cigarette butt flattened into the ground with time, a dead bird in the gutter. Occasionally a reference to the tumultuous political moment emerges in the form of a zip tie or a rubber bullet. But the artist's persistent, fixed attention to the literal ground begs the question of what the artist's gaze is avoiding?
The rest of Segal’s artist statement as follows:
ICE kidnaps dozens of people from a garment company a block from my studio. The next day, I notice a cactus on my walk that is covered with spiders sunning themselves. Their webs are woven over one another’s and in and out of the thorns.
In the morning I open my phone and see the remains of a Palestinian child in a plastic bag being waved at the camera by another child. In the afternoon, I become obsessed with a leaky pipe in my parking lot which has caused a lush oasis of weeds to burst through the cracks in one particular spot in the concrete.
I help wheel the abandoned elote cart of a man who was snatched off the street in my neighborhood to a nearby home for safekeeping until someone can contact his family and tell them he is gone. Later in my studio, I hunch over my painting and in painstaking detail coax the form of an animal's decomposing remains out of an abstraction of green paint.
Compared to what is outside my door, everything else feels dim. I am not sure what art is for anymore. My art friends insist that in this moment, more than ever, art is necessary. I wonder how the urgency of this moment makes it more necessary than ever to do…. exactly what we did yesterday and the day before? When does this moment call for more? When is it time for our bodies to be on the streets? When is throwing a molotov cocktailnecessary?
I am at a loss about how to make art about this moment. My mom sometimes jokes that she’s afraid of the planet Jupiter because it’s JUST TOO DAMN BIG for her to comprehend. I think about Lot’s unnamed wife who dared to peek directly at the terror and turned into a pillar of salt. I think about a possum, paralyzed with fear, playing dead until the monsters pass.
This One Wild and Precious Life. 2026. Water media and salt on paper. 26 x 20".
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Molly Segal is a Los Angeles-based painter whose watercolors explore fragile connections, finite resources, and the price of survival in inhospitable climates. Her work considers the cognitive dissonance it takes to exist in a time and place where disaster and decadence converge. Her paintings have been exhibited at François Ghebaly, Track 16, Charlie James Gallery, and the The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2025 she co-curated the group exhibition Praise The Dying Beauty With All Your Breath at Track 16. She was an inaugural artist-in-residence at the Quinn Emanuel Artist Residency in Los Angeles in 2021. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Whitehot Magazine, Artillery, and Lapham’s Quarterly. Segal received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2013 and has taught painting and drawing at CSU Long Beach, Tufts University, SMFA, and Golden West College. She is from Oakland, CA. Segal is represented by Track 16 in Los Angeles.
