Molly Soda’s work holds a mirror to our mediated communication behaviour and the nature of our conversation in mediated space. She addresses the ambiguity of this form of connecting - often in a humorous way: is it intimate or distanced, deep or superficial, supportive or detrimental,... or all of this at once? It is painfully recognizable in All I have is my Phone (2016) and Phone Zone (2016) where Soda’s facial expression alternates between a.o. bored, happy and sad while looking through her phone as she lies in bed. In We’ve All Been There (2016), Soda dives deeper into the nature of online chatroom conversation, adding layer upon layer of performativity and role-playing. The result is genuine doubt about who is playing with who, and what is (for) real, if anything, in a world of online strangers.

Courtesy the artist, Annka Kultys Gallery, and private collection

All I have is my Phone, 2016, video, 5’58”, loop
Phone Zone, 2016, video, 13’11”, loop
We’ve All Been There, 2016, video, 5’39”, loop
Me Singing Stay by Rihanna, 2018, video, 4’28”, loop
I’m funny and I cry a lot, 2016, C-type print on aluminium, 41.2 x 57.3 cm
Bored, WYD?, 2017, UV print on mirrored acrylic, 152.5 x 65 cm

Image credit: Molly Soda - All I have is my Phone © Molly Soda

Molly Soda
°1989, Puerto Rico

Molly Soda is a visual artist working with video, installation, interactive art, performance and print media. Her work is often hosted online, specifically on social media platforms, allowing the work to evolve and interact with the platforms themselves. Soda engages with questions of revisiting one’s own virtual legacy, how we present ourselves and perform for imagined others online and how the ever shifting nature of our digital space affects our memories and self concept. Molly Soda received her B.F.A. in Photography and Imaging from Tish School of Art, New York University in 2011. Her work has been shown in several group shows world-wide, a.o.: Virtual Normality: Women Net Artists 2.0, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany, (2018); Your Digital Self Hates You, Stadt Bern, Bern, Switzerland (2016); The Wrong Digital Art Biennale, Seoul (2015). Molly Soda is represented by Annka Kultys Gallery. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.