The Capital City Arts Initiative’s exhibition, Soft Walls, Deep Water, presents works by Molly Allen. Grounded in intuition and guided by a desire to find poetry in fragmentation, her art offers atmospheres—spaces to drift in and explore.

Allen’s exhibit will be at the Courthouse Gallery from June 16 – Sept. 25, 2025. CCAI will host a reception for the artist on Wednesday, June 18, from 5-6:30 p.m., with the artist’s introduction at 5:30 p.m. The courthouse is located at 885 E. Musser St., Carson City; the gallery is open Monday – Friday, 8 a.m.–5 p.m.

Soft Walls, Deep Water is a series of intimate, surreal collage works that slip between interior and exterior, body and object, memory and substance. Drawing from architecture, design, and the uncanny, these assembled scenes operate like psychological rooms—constructed yet unstable, poetic yet precise.

Allen described her ceramic sculpture, Caress as “A tangle of small, gestural hands—both reaching and resting—suggests tenderness, tension, and the complexity of touch.”

Thinking about her art as writing or as poetry, Allen said, “I create and seek imagery—furniture, landscapes, fishes, stones, draperies, flesh—that becomes estranged from its original context and reoriented into liminal spatial arrangements. Familiar elements are made strange, inviting the viewer to inhabit a space where perception is soft-edged and mutable.

“The most recent collages, created during a residency at Burren College of Art in Ireland, reflect a shift in spatial rhythm and visual pairing. Immersed in a landscape dense with history and material memory, I found myself responding to a different kind of depth—one shaped by ancient stone walls, layered time, and cultural texture. These works subtly contrast the Irish landscape and its long-held history with the expansiveness and ever-changing West of the United States, a terrain I often work from. In these pairings, I began to trace how psychological space is shaped not only by architecture, but by the emotional legacies embedded in land.”

Allen is an interdisciplinary artist working with sculptural ceramics and collage. She holds an Master of Fine Arts in ceramics from Ohio University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in ceramics and new genres from Sierra Nevada College. She also completed a post-baccalaureate program at the University of Montana.

Allen’s work has been exhibited in more 50 exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Recently, her work was included in the Off Center International Ceramics Competition at the Blue Line Arts Gallery in Roseville, California, and in Thinking Through Animals at the Canton Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio. This spring, she was an artist in residence at the Burren College of Art in Ireland. Her previous residencies were at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Alberta; Pottery Northwest in Seattle, Washington; International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét, Hungary; Medalta Ceramics, Medicine Hat, Alberta; Mendocino Art Center, Mendocino, California; and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Edgecomb, ME. https://www.molly-allen.com/

She currently lives on the shores of Lake Tahoe, where she works as an interdisciplinary art professor and gallery director at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

Chris Lanier wrote the exhibition essay, which is available as a gallery handout and archived at ccainv.org. Lanier is an artist and critic who generally likes to mix things up – words and pictures, video and performance, design, and art. He’s had work shown and published in the U.S., Mexico, England, Japan, France, Canada, and Serbia – and has written for The Believer, HiLobrow, Furtherfield, Rhizome, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Comics Journal. He was awarded a Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellowship in 2024 and served as Reno City Artist for 2024. He is a teaching professor of digital art at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe (formerly Sierra Nevada College). Read more at http://chrislanierart.wordpress.com.

April Reyes, a Western Nevada College Latino Leadership Academy student, provided the Spanish translation of the show’s wall text.

CCAI is an artist-centered not-for-profit organization committed to community engagement in contemporary visual arts through exhibitions, illustrated talks, arts education programs, artist residencies, and online activities.

The Initiative is funded by the John and Grace Nauman Foundation, Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, Carson City Cultural Commission, Kaplan Family Charitable Fund, Southwest Gas Corporation Foundation, Steele & Associates LLC, and CCAI sponsors and members.

For additional information, please visit CCAI’s website at www.ccainv.org.