Material Resistance: Two Local Artists Explore the Forces That Shape Our Lives

October 17, 2026 – January 17, 2027
The Art Gallery of Peterborough

The forces that shape the natural world aren’t so different from those that shape our lives. Gravity, pressure, friction and the passage of time leave their marks on everything, from the rugged landscape of the Canadian Shield to the complicated terrain of human experience.

In Material Resistance, artists Molly Moldovan and Kelly O’Neill bring together two distinct creative practices to explore those connections, using sculpture, installation, painting and mixed media to examine themes of loss, identity, resilience and transformation.

Both artists have strong ties to the Peterborough region, and both approach their work with an understanding that materials have stories to tell, sometimes as much as the artists themselves.

Molly Moldovan, based in Apsley, draws much of her inspiration from the landscape surrounding her home at the edge of the Canadian Shield. The changing textures, colours and geological character of the region have become central influences in a career spanning abstraction, sculpture, installation and painting.

A second-generation Canadian and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Moldovan brings a personal awareness of history, memory and survival to her artistic perspective.

A 1991 honours graduate of the Ontario College of Art, now OCAD University, she continued her studies at the Haliburton School of Art and Design in 2014.

Her artistic career has included exhibitions throughout Ontario and beyond, with notable projects including The Democracy Project at the Art Gallery of Peterborough in 2004 and Impact Aids: 10 Years of Broken Promises at Toronto’s Rebecca Gallery in 2006.

Moldovan has also played an important role in supporting the region’s arts community. She is a founder of the Apsley Autumn Studio Tour, serves as lead curator and board member of the Art Gallery of Bancroft, and previously sat on the board of the Art Gallery of Peterborough. Her contributions have earned her the Peterborough County Award for Leadership in Arts and Culture, along with several Best in Show honours.

Kelly O’Neill, who lives and works in Selwyn, approaches art through an equally personal but distinctly material-driven process. Working with found objects, natural materials, textiles, video and assemblage, she explores the impermanence of human experience and the ways objects can carry meaning long after their original purpose has passed.

Her journey into the professional art world took a less conventional route. After earning a degree in Philosophy and English Literature, O’Neill worked as a social worker before becoming a full-time mother of four. Although she maintained an artistic practice throughout those years, she eventually returned to formal studies, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Installation from OCAD University in 2018.

Since then, her work has appeared in galleries and festivals across Canada, including Montreal’s Art Mûr, Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, Cambridge Galleries, Vancouver’s Pendulum Gallery and North Bay’s WKP Kennedy Gallery.

Closer to home, O’Neill has contributed to exhibitions and projects at Artspace, Erring at King George and the Art Gallery of Peterborough. She has also worked as a curator, juror and community arts facilitator.

While their materials and methods differ, Moldovan and O’Neill share an interest in how things change under pressure, whether those forces come from nature, history or personal experience.

Material Resistance brings those perspectives together in an exhibition that invites viewers to look beyond the surface of the work and consider the invisible forces that helped create it.

It’s an intriguing pairing of two accomplished regional artists whose work suggests that resistance isn’t always about refusing to change. Sometimes it’s about what survives the process.

Material Resistance features the work of Molly Moldovan and Kelly O’Neill, exploring the relationship between physical forces, memory, identity and resilience through contemporary visual art.