Molly Soda: Daughter of the Internet
“My favorite thing about the work that I make is the misconceptions that people have because we’re looking at each other online all day and we’re just projecting whatever onto one another. I think it’s really amazing that people interact with my work and they don’t know that I’m an artist.”
© Molly Soda. MY DESKTOP DECOR *RELAXING,* 2019. Video, 10 minutes, 36 seconds. 1920 x 1080. Courtesy Jack Barrett Gallery.
By CJ Dansdill
She looks like she’s still a teenager, but she totally knows herself. She’s Molly Soda. It doesn't really matter if anyone thinks it’s not art, because it is. You Got This, her second solo show with Jack Barrett Gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, opened on Sunday, March 1st, and runs through the 21st of April. The exhibition features new works across a range of mediums including video and installation. You Got This ponders authenticity and ambition, and their particular relevance to the construction of personas in the early age of the Internet.
“Drawing inspiration from the aesthetics of American suburbia, as well as cultures of wellness, self-help, and self-improvement, You Got This is an interrogation of an economy of hope. It prompts the viewer to consider the pervasiveness of the branded self in society, and frames the question of what is at stake when we aspire toward something in both personal and structural terms.” -Noah Huber, Jack Barrett Gallery
© Molly Soda. HOUSE TOUR! My First Home! FINALLY, 2020. Video, 14 minutes, 24 seconds. 1920 x 1080.
As a former teen who grew up in middle class suburbia, I spent what seems like most of adolescent life in my bedroom. My room was my mood board, my sanctuary, a diorama of what the inside of my brain looked like, and I relate strongly to Molly’s bedroom culture aesthetic. Molly was born in Puerto Rico and then moved to rural Indianna. Living in suburbia, the Internet became an outlet and means of access to a diverse world that is at times inclusive and welcoming, and at others, dangerous and evil. Molly’s internet presence heightened around 2013 after years of compiling material on her Tumblr blog of over 30k followers. After the creation of INBOX FULL in 2013, curator Lindsay Howard contacted Molly about Paddles ON!, the first major art auction of digital material that she had organized around a number of video artists. Molly sold sold INBOX FULL for $1,500, and has been on the upward climb ever since.
Installation by Molly Soda, photo courtesy of Jack Barrett Gallery.
I made it about 45 minutes into INBOX FULL before I started skipping forward. She’s sounds congested, like she’s getting over a cold. She has a blanket around her shoulders. Her voice is kind of monotone, but strong, and her gaze is one of careful confidence. No, you can’t tell what she feels about each message she reads. She is performing her celebrity as a reflective endurance production of Internet culture. Behind her hanging on her closet door is a tiny orange cow boy hat and a hot pink feather boa. The walls are pink too. At one point she slurps ramen while reading out the messages. Many are asking advice about sobriety, as Molly had previously blogged on her Tumblr about her decision to abstain from alcohol. They also ask about their relationships, and their relationships with their art, and how to be better, cooler, hotter people.
© Molly Soda. MY DESKTOP DECOR *RELAXING,* 2019. Video, 10 minutes, 36 seconds. 1920 x 1080.
I think my drug use is getting in the way of my art, do you have any thoughts on how to get past this? Where do you buy nail polish, hair dye, lip stick, septum rings, all your cute clothes? Why don’t you shave? What’s your moon and rising sign? How was your high school experience? I don’t like you. Molly I like you so much.
Video art has become increasingly prevalent in liberal arts colleges in the post-Tumblr twenty-teens. Since Youtube was invented in 2005, and Tumblr was invented in 2007, confessional, online diary, vlog culture has become a mainstream means for people to communicate and express themselves through personal narratives harnessed by the tools provided by the world wide web.
Molly Soda, Shelf. Photo courtesy of Jack Barrett Gallery.
You Got This features four unique sculptural installations meant to reflect the artist’s aesthetic exploration of ‘bedroom culture.’ A rack of curiously scented candles designed by Soda, a window box plant arrangement, and vinyl decals are included. These materials imitate a combination Soda’s signature desktop aesthetic with the environmental components within her physical space. There are also four videos, each of which are meditations on common types of Internet video culture - the vlog, the unboxing after a shopping spree, the house tour, the ASMR video, and the makeup collection. Many YouTubers from a wide range of demographics and genres post videos about life advice, shopping tips, walk throughs of their daily routines, and tours of their homes and bedrooms. Molly’s shopping list, displayed to viewers in an hour long piece, HUGE! Solo Show Haul, details the materials she intends to use for her installations at her solo show: Candle making wares, (a variety of jars, wicks, labels, and scent samples such as ointment, basement, nail polish remover, and gardenia) glue, rhinestones, plastic flies, a chocolate fountain, which she plans to rig with a voluminous mixture of dozens of different essential and facial oils, dandelion, mugwort, and clover seeds, and vessels in which to grow and nurture the plants for her window boxes. She talks about holding onto things and not having enough room. Her voice is a combination of Los Angeles, New York,. It still sounds like she is getting over a cold, which is endearing, human, and perplexingly complimentary to her bedroom performance.
© Molly Soda. HOUSE TOUR! My First Home! FINALLY, 2020. Video, 14 minutes, 24 seconds. 1920 x 1080.
What Molly Soda is compiling in her growing body of digital art works is a narrative of the millennial experience - of being raised in the age of the Internet, and spending increments of time on it that appear unhealthy and pointless to other generations. Her work also speaks to those who share a collective form of anxiety induced by excessive exposure to social media and obsession with online persona. Her message is not necessarily foreboding, it is almost a manifesto for the future, a salute to the era that is and was the 2000s, a tribute to her time. Has the internet created you, or have you created yourself using the Internet? You Got This incites spectators to consider how heavily curated personas in society permeate culture. Her work examines the thrift and austerity of the American values of wellness and self-help.
For more on Soda and her work, find her website here and her gallery profile here.
