Molly+Friends presents “Receipts of Becoming” an online exhibition surrounding the belief that before we can truly offer love to another, we must first offer a "Valentine" to the ghosts of our past selves.
This show is an audit of evolution: a celebration of the growth that happens when we stop deleting our history and start wanting to frame it. Drawing from the tradition of the "commonplace book" and the archival instinct, we invited artists to submit work that interrogates who they were in order to celebrate where they are now.
Featuring: Joana Duarte, Sandra Cavanagh, Logan Benedict, Mike Habs, Giovanni Senzano, Alex Blaisdell, Lowell Stephens, Eden Chinn,
Joana Duarte
Joana Duarte (Portugal, 1999) is a visual artist based in the Netherlands. Working across photography, painting, and installation, her practice engages with family archives, memory, and the instability of images, often through processes of erosion, transfer, and erasure. Since 2018, her work has been shown in museums, galleries, and independent spaces in Portugal, Japan, and the Netherlands.
“For me, offering a Valentine to a past self does not mean correcting or aestheticizing it. It means staying with gestures I still don’t fully understand.
When I was a child, I used to draw my mother as a horse. I don’t know why. At the time, it wasn’t symbolic or ironic; it was simply how she appeared to me. Years later, as I understand more about the violence and isolation that shaped her life, that image feels heavier, unresolved.
This project is my way of acknowledging that early, unknowing version of myself, not as something to outgrow or erase, but as something that already held an intuition my adult self is still trying to approach. The “receipt” is not proof of innocence, but evidence of an unfinished way of seeing that continues to inform my work.
The receipt I’m submitting is a childhood drawing I made at five years old of my mother as a horse. I don’t know why I drew it then, and I still don’t fully understand it now. It is a trace of a self trying to make sense of a life shaped by endurance, silence, and unseen pressures, proof of a version of me that was unknowing, stubborn, and already carrying weight I couldn’t yet name.
The work I’m submitting belongs to a new series titled I Used to Draw My Mother as a Horse. In this series, I intervene in original photographs of my mother using chemical solutions to dilute and erode the analog image. Through processes of dissolution and erasure, I work with disappearance as a way to stay with uncertainty, allowing new meanings to emerge rather than resolving the image.”
Sandra Cavanagh
Sandra Cavanagh was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her early life was pitched on a growing awareness of the prevailing political instability, an overbearing patriarchal society and the dangers of state sanctioned brutality and censorship. Cavanagh read Social Sciences at the University of Belgrano, emigrated to California and later to the UK. She is a Fine Art graduate from Kent Institute of Art and Design. Since 2010 she’s worked and resided in New York City. Cavanagh’s work has been exhibited at various venues, including the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Pen & Brush, Gallery 14C, and Westbeth Gallery in New York; Miami National Fine Arts in Florida; and Museo Limen in Italy. In November 2025, she will have a solo exhibition at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Her art has received recognition, including the Waave New York Women's Art Month Award in 2025 and a 2023 finalist spot for the Women United Art Prize. Most recently, she has been awarded the 2025 Jackson Art Prize Oil Award and Homien’s Spring 2025 Art Prize. Features of Cavanagh’s practice include the covers of Create! Magazine and Feminist Space Journal, as well as interviews with Homiens, Jackson’s, Canvas Rebel, and features in the Jersey Journal, White Hot Magazine, and Contemporary Art Collectors.
“I have chosen to evoke early memories of childhood and the physical presence of my mother, from birth to her death. It is a remembrance of an early, fresh and hopeful openness to experience.”
Logan Benedict
Logan Benedict was born and raised in Delaware and now resides in Philadelphia. Their work has been exhibited at numerous New York City galleries including the One World Observatory, Cluster Gallery, Established Gallery, One Art Space, Con Artist Collective, DAS NYC, Local Project and Spantzo Gallery as well as at the Vancouver Arts & Leisure in British Columbia. Since 2016, Benedict has published five books of art and poetry through Amazon.
“Growing up as a very insecure, queer child in a small town, I used art to disguise and reinvent myself as a means of self defense and preservation. A lot of my craft is addressing my past and making sense of the messes I've made and the trauma I've faced through collage and mixed media assemblages. (The person in my "receipt" photo is a very lost, confused 19 year old in New York City, falling in love for the first time and losing myself in an abusive relationship.)”
Mike Habs
Mike Habs is an Irish American contemporary artist recognized for his encrypted rhythmic approach to abstract expressionism and graffiti. Using an in-depth understanding of color, contrast, and technique, his use of expansive urban aesthetics juxtaposed against minimalist and script techniques communicates energetic and inspirational messages of transcending adversity. Mike was recently selected as the winner of ABC7 LA’s official design for Los Angeles’s 2024 “Pride” month & AIDS Walk LA. Mike’s artwork has been archived in the National Stonewall Museum, featured on NBC’s “Will & Grace”, commissioned by the LA Giltinis Major League Rugby Team, and shown during Art Week Miami. With a resume exceeding a decade of solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York City, Provincetown, and Miami, his murals can be seen painted on walls across the country and his works in many homes and galleries across the United States. Mike is currently based in Los Angeles, California.
“[My working] table served as the sole production surface for all paintings created between 2013 and 2019. The piece challenges the distinction between tool and artwork, support and supported. The accumulated material—a collage of spills, tests, and corrections—is the direct, indexical record of artistic exploration that preceded the finished canvases. It is tangible evidence of the arduous process behind creation, insisting that the history of making becomes integral to the work itself.”
Giovanni Senzano
Giovanni Senzano is a poet and filmmaker from New York City working in image, sound, and song.
“I interpret the theme as showcasing art's transformative power in achieving self-love and self-understanding. In this vein, Dear Ana is a film about confronting the past, taking ownership of mistakes, and making peace with ghosts. It centers around one ghost in particular, Ana, and depicts the writing and drowning of a love letter addressed to them over the course of a day. The viewer is taken through earnest personal moments of reflection, yearning, regret, and inspiration as they read the contents of the letter on-screen. Various human shades of emotion are displayed, ultimately culminating in acceptance through ritualized destruction and symbolized baptism. The aim of this work, in line with the exhibition’s theme, is to embrace error as sincerely as possible and, in doing so, resolve the past and extend grace to oneself in the present.
[My] ‘receipts’ are scans of the waterlogged letter, along with three black and white photo prints documenting the creation of the film in the woods of Vermont, 2025.”
Alex Blaisdell
Alex Blaisdell is a painter and printmaker from Massachusetts working in Boston’s South End. He has participated in artist residencies at Radio28 in Mexico City, Mexico (2025) and Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina (2023) and has exhibited work at the Cambridge Art Association, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, and Boston City Hall. Alex studied at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where he was awarded the Studio Foundation Award of Recognition (2019), the Foundation Painting Award (2021), and the George Nick Auction Award (2022).
“I often imagine an itemized list (or receipt) of my qualities and which family members I’ve inherited them from. Critical thinker from my dad, club rat from my mom, painting skills from my Grandpa Fitzpatrick, rheumatoid arthritis from my Grandma Annie. These people, many of them people of the past, feel like a part of me in a way I can’t stop wanting to identify. It feels like to find myself, I need to find the people who made me who I am, but what does it say about me if those people are so flawed?
My paintings allude to this overlapping of complex and contradictory identities; to feel proud of a culture and family that values education and progressivism, but simultaneously feel ostracized by that same environment because of its Catholic and conservative-libertarian sensibilities.
There was a time when I was proud of my wisdom teeth. They grew straight and didn’t impact any other teeth, a trait I inherited from my dad, but I had to get them removed because they kept giving me cavities. Perhaps my wisdom teeth having been removed is a receipt of progress. You can still see their natural shape I inherited from my ancestors, but I’ve put them in a much more comfortable and productive place (my cigar-box of sentimental trinkets) than my ancestors had (in their mouths, giving them cavities).”
Lowell Stephens
Lowell Stephens is a painter working in the figurative abstract tradition, creating work that explores gesture, movement, and the tension between representation and abstraction.
Drawing influence from the New York School and COBRA movements, Stephens' work combines visceral brushwork with an architectural sensibility developed through his background in design.
Working primarily in oil, the paintings balance spontaneous mark-making with deliberate composition, allowing figures and forms to emerge from layers of color and gesture.
“Page 1 is from a time when I wasn't sure where art fit in my life. Writing down that question "does it continue to follow its nature and grow to its fullest potential?", both asked and answered something that sat with me for a long time. Page 2 comes later, deep in adulthood, grateful for whatever stolen time I get. TWO_MINUTEHATE came from a recent re-reading of 1984. During this turbulent moment, while we persevere, there's an undeniable fog of hate in the atmosphere. This painting is a continuation of interpreting the world through my experience and my craft. The flower continues to grow. ”
Eden Chinn
Eden Chinn is an artist, curator, and educator whose work explores femininity and self-construction through media. Working across photography, installation, and bookmaking, her practice reflects on how media shapes and reflects identity. Her research examines the evolution of feminist self-portraiture in relation to technological change. She is the Co-Founder of All Street Gallery, an artist-run exhibition and community space with locations in the East Village and Chinatown. Through All Street, she has curated exhibitions and public programs that foreground socially conscious practices and support emerging and underrepresented artists.
