Richard Heller Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition for LA-based artist, Molly Greene, entitled Operator. This is Greene's first solo exhibition with the gallery. From the Artist: To me, this body of work deals with the issue of touch. What does it mean to touch another being, to be in contact, to make contact? Touching always occurs through a membrane, there is always empty space, charged with electricity, between my body and what I touch. I’m interested in these barriers where exchanges are made and messages are sent, received, distorted, and muffled. These paintings are concerned with the urge to make contact and the limitations inherent in touching. AI is something new to touch. While I was making these paintings, ChatGPT was released to the public prompting a wave of civic and personal reckoning with the future of the human-machine relationship. For me, the title ‘Operator’ is about agency. An operator can be thought of as the controller of machinery or tools, a surgeon, a combatant, or any force causing movement. Much of the handwringing about AI and LLMs has to do with a certain uneasiness or uncertainty about who the operator is in these relationships with AI—who is acting and who is being acted upon? Who is driving the narrative? This backdrop has been a helpful way to think through longstanding interests in the limits of agency and the ongoing (and usually violent) human project of assigning and negotiating authorship, personhood, control, sentience, and bodily autonomy. Who or what is permitted to “think” or “feel”? I’m interested in questions about the capacity of machines (and other non-human operators) to suffer, to create, to desire, to exist, to consume, to refuse. ~ Molly Greene About the Artist: Molly Greene (b. 1986, Cornwall, VT), lives and works in Los Angeles. Greene received her PhD, MA, and MPhil in American Studies from Yale University and received her MESc in Environmental Science from Yale University. Greene has studied themes such as science, technology, and gender. Greene began painting in 2018 after moving to Los Angeles to complete her doctoral dissertation. Since then, she has examined binary forms of thinking by creating imagery that is purposefully difficult to categorize. Recent exhibitions include Kapp Kapp, New York and Philadelphia; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; and Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris.