Molly Soda

Last updated

Molly Soda
Born (1989-01-28) January 28, 1989 (age 34)
San Juan, Puerto Rico
NationalityAmerican
OccupationArtist
Movement Video art, performance art, photography, new media art, Post-Internet

Amalia Soto, known as Molly Soda, is a Brooklyn-based internet performance artist. [1] Soda works across a variety of digital platforms, producing selfies videos, GIFs, zines, and web-based performance art, which are presented both online and in gallery installations in a variety of forms. [2] Molly Soda's work explores the technological mediation of self-concept, contemporary feminism, cyberfeminism, mass media and popular social media culture. [3] Molly Soda is the co-editor with Arvida Byström of the 2017 book Pics or It Didn't Happen: Images Banned from Instagram. [4] [5] [6]

Contents

Biography

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1989, Molly Soda grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. Soda studied photography and Imaging Tisch School of the Arts in New York City, graduating with a BFA in 2011. [7] Soda cites performance artists such as Marina Abramović and Carolee Schneeman as artistic influences. [8] Since 2011, Molly Soda has worked out of Chicago, Detroit and New York.

Celebrity

Molly Soda started blogging as a teenager. [9] In the late 2000s, her Tumblr blog began to attract attention beyond the Tumblr sphere, gaining notoriety on the site and on wider social media platforms. She became an iconic micro-celebrity, known for teen confessions-style art and for her widely imitated personal aesthetic in multiple online subcultures. [10] In 2011, she was involved in the emergence of seapunk microculture, [11] and became an occasional back-up dancer for techno-pop musician Grimes. [12]

Work

Molly Soda was first recognized for her college senior thesis, Tween Dreams, [13] The work is a YouTube video series, later released on VHS, about a group of preteen friends growing up in the suburbs and living the drama of high school dances, chatroom fights, and meeting boys at the mall in the 2000s. Soda was the only actress in the work and played every character. [14]

Soda's 2013 webcam video Inbox Full was presented at the Tumblr digital art auction organized by curator Lindsay Howard. Inbox Full is a ten-hour-long endurance performance and video piece, "in which she dictates every absurd message in her Tumblr inbox. Her transparent self-presentation is refreshing amongst tediously-curated online personalities". [15] [16] [17]

In 2015, as part of an ongoing art project, Should I Send This?, Molly Soda leaked her own nude selfies, expressing that "Women SHOULD be feeling themselves…SHOULD be taking control of the way they are represented in media/art by photographing themselves". [18]

Soda's Virtual Spellbook (2015) on the internet platform NewHive addresses agency within technology at the same time as making fun of the traditionally female perspective of Wicca, [19] by providing a series of interactive spells to deal with technology. [20]

In her 2015 work, From My Bedroom to Yours, Soda combined Tumblr aesthetic, kitsch and internet culture within a confessional space that reflected her own bedroom/studio to demonstrate her vulnerability. [21] Soda designed the gallery to look like a private space, treating a physical gallery space differently than her on line presence, as if people somehow take things more seriously in real life. [22] With From My Bedroom to Yours, Soda "combined 'tween Tumblr aesthetic', kitsch and 'lowbrow internet culture' with a kind of 'unmade-but-made confessionalism' to create intimacy through the recreation of Soda's own bedroom within the walls of the gallery".

Molly Soda has exhibited both in the United States and Internationally with solo exhibitions in New York (Jack Barrett), Los Angeles (Leiminspace), Bloomington (Breezeway Gallery) and London, England (Annka Kultys Gallery). [23] Molly Soda, in an augmented reality project in collaboration with Nicole Ruggiero and the Berlin collective Refrakt, was awarded the 2017 Lumen Founders' Prize. [24]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Neel</span> American painter (1900–1984)

Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her career spanned from the 1920s to 1980s. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. She pursued a career as a figurative painter during a period when abstraction was favored, and she did not begin to gain critical praise for her work until the 1960s.

Molly Maud Kiely is a Canadian-American alternative cartoonist best known for erotica. Her work is published by Fantagraphics/Eros Comix and has influenced other artists such as Jess Fink.

Ivana Bašić is a Serbian artist living and working in New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Haasts Bluff, Northern Territory</span> Community in the Northern Territory, Australia

Haasts Bluff, also known as Ikuntji, is an Aboriginal Australian community in Central Australia, a region of the Northern Territory. The community is located in the MacDonnell Shire local government area, 227 kilometres (141 mi) west of Alice Springs. At the 2006 census, the community, including outstations, had a population of 207.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet art</span> Form of art distributed on the Internet

Internet art is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the physical gallery and museum system. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Petra Cortright</span> American artist

Petra Cortright is an American artist working in video, painting, and digital media.

Seapunk is a subculture that originated on Tumblr in 2011. It is associated with an aquatic-themed style of fashion, 3D net art, iconography, and allusions to popular culture of the 1990s. The advent of seapunk also spawned its own electronic music microgenre, featuring elements of Southern hip hop and pop music and R&B music of the 1990s. Seapunk gained limited popularity as it spread through the Internet, although it was said to have developed a Chicago club scene.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Lee</span>

Marc Lee is a Swiss new media artist working in the fields of interactive installation art, internet art, performance art and video art.

Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music and a subgenre of Hauntology, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s, and became well-known in 2015. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, 1970s elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, stylized Greek sculptures, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Post-Internet</span> 21st century art movement

Post-Internet is a 21st-century art movement involving works that are derived from the Internet or its effects on aesthetics, culture and society.

Lorna Mills is a Canadian net.art and new media artist who is known for her digital animations, videos, and GIFs. Mills has done work in other mediums such as installations. Her work explores how "the notion of public decency is anachronistic" Her use of GIFs are gathered through the dark net which includes 4chan, pornfails, and Russian domains. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lindsay Howard</span> American curator

Lindsay Howard is an American curator, writer, and new media scholar based in New York City whose work explores how the internet is shaping art and culture.

<i>Library of the Printed Web</i> Physical archive

Library of the Printed Web is a physical archive devoted to web-to-print artists’ books, zines and other printout matter. Founded by Paul Soulellis in 2013, the collection was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art Library in January 2017. The project has been described as "web culture articulated as printed artifact," an "archive of archives," characterized as an "accumulation of accumulations," much of it printed on demand. Techniques for appropriating web content used by artists in the collection include grabbing, hunting, scraping and performing, detailed by Soulellis in "Search, Compile, Publish," and later referenced by Alessandro Ludovico.

Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels (1936–2004) was an Australian Aboriginal ritual leader, Warlipiri speaker, renowned artist, and land -rights advocate for the Warlipiri people of the Northern Territory.

Signe Pierce is an American artist. She has worked in performance, photography, video and digital art. Her works have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum in New York, and at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kimberly Drew</span> American art curator, writer, activist

Kimberly Drew is an American art influencer and writer. She is best known as the former social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her use of the social media handle MuseumMammy. Drew released her first book, This Is What I Know About Art in June 2020, as part of a children series from Penguin, and published an anthology titled Black Futures with New York Times staff writer Jenna Wortham in December 2020.

Erika DeFreitas is a Toronto-based artist who works in textiles, performance and photography.

Arvida Byström is a Swedish artist, who is mainly known as a photographer and model, but who also makes music. She is based in Los Angeles, London and Stockholm. She cooperates with many magazines and brands such as Nasty Gal, Monki, Wonderland Magazine, Lula Magazine, Vice, Rookie, Garage Magazine, Baby Baby Baby magazine and I heart magazine.

RaFia Santana is a non-binary American artist, musician, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work ranges from animated gifs to self-portraiture, videos, and performance to editioned clothing and electronic music exploring gentrification, the millennial mindset, mental health, and the lived black experience. They use the internet as a medium to share their artwork, empower black and brown communities, and challenge ideas of solidarity and alliance. She had exhibitions and/or performances at the Eyebeam, AdVerse Fest, SleepCenter, Times Square Arts, International Center of Photography, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Babycastles, Museum of the Moving Image and Museum of Contemporary African Disaporan Arts, Roots & Culture amongst many notable venues. Her work has been featured in publications such as Huffington Post, HyperAllergic, Rhizome, ArtFCity, Vogue, Teen Vogue and Salon. They have participated in panels, performances and discussions such as Cultured Magazine, "Late at Tate Britain", Creative Tech Week NYC, Afrotectopia at Google NYC, NYU, "Black Portraitures IV: The Color of Silence" at Harvard University and International Center for Photography. Their music is released through Never Normal Records.

Christoph David Drange is a German artist, best known for his use of digital found-objects in post-digital paintings of contemporary influencers and social media symbolism.

References

  1. ↑ Ables, Kelsey (May 13, 2020). "Art that pops off your computer screen". The Washington Post .
  2. ↑ "Narcissistic, Maybe. But Is There More To The Art Of The Selfie?". NPR.org. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  3. ↑ Kelsey, Colleen (April 10, 2020). "We're Quarantining at Molly Soda's House". PAPER. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  4. ↑ Annie, Felix (March 15, 2017). "NSFW: Check Out Arvida Byström and Molly Soda's Collection of Banned Instagram Photos". PAPER. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  5. ↑ "Molly Soda, Digital Performance Artist | American Masters | PBS". American Masters. December 20, 2017. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  6. ↑ Molly Soda and Arvida Bystroem, eds. (2017) Pics or It Didn't Happen: Images Banned From Instagram London: Prestel ISBN   3791383078
  7. ↑ "DPI Alum Molly Soda Presents at Hasselblad". tisch.nyu.edu. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  8. ↑ Pearce, Victoria. "INTERVIEW WITH THE SELF-CONFESSED 'WEBCAM PRINCESS', MOLLY SODA Spindle". Archived from the original on November 17, 2016. Retrieved October 21, 2017.
  9. ↑ Mosey, Alice (April 9, 2015). "The digital artist who's dating a teddy bear". Dazed. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  10. ↑ Marshall, P. David, Redmond, Sean A Companion to Celebrity, 2015, John Wiley & Sons, p. 339
  11. ↑ Raymer, Miles (January 12, 2012). "The week seapunk broke". Chicago Reader. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  12. ↑ Fishman, Elly (July 16, 2012). "Pitchfork 2012: Best and Worst of the Festival". Chicago magazine. Archived from the original on July 21, 2012. Retrieved October 5, 2021.
  13. ↑ "No Gallery? No Problem: 9 Millennial Art Strategies That Are Shaping the Future of Contemporary Art". Artnet News. September 18, 2018. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  14. ↑ James-Wilson, Matthew (April 30, 2017). "Molly Soda, Forge" . Retrieved October 20, 2017.
  15. ↑ Cheng, Susan. "The Most Important Artists of 2013". Complex. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  16. ↑ Rosenbohm, Randon. "Alone with Molly Soda". Archived from the original on March 7, 2017. Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  17. ↑ "Paddle8". Archived from the original on November 6, 2013. Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  18. ↑ Mosey, Alice (June 17, 2015). "Molly Soda silences the haters". Dazed. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  19. ↑ Newell-Hanson, Alice; Hines, Alice (July 28, 2015). "Molly soda's internet spellbook can help you stop insta stalking your ex i-D" . Retrieved October 21, 2017.
  20. ↑ Rose DeFabio, Cara (July 26, 2015). "Want to banish trolls? A digital artist wrote a 'spellbook' for the Internet Splinter" . Retrieved October 21, 2017.
  21. ↑ "Molly Soda: From My Bedroom To Yours @ Annka Kulty's Gallery – Eastlondonlines". www.eastlondonlines.co.uk. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  22. ↑ Loftus, Jamie (September 6, 2016). "OG Digital Artist Molly Soda Is Not The Face of Cyber-Feminism". Inverse. Retrieved November 6, 2021.
  23. ↑ "Annka Kultys Gallery bio". November 16, 2015. Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  24. ↑ "Lumen Prize". Archived from the original on August 13, 2017. Retrieved October 19, 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.