Molly Soda

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

Molly Soda
Born (1989-01-28) January 28, 1989
San Juan, Puerto Rico
NationalityAmerican
OccupationArtist
MovementVideo art, performance art, photography, new media art

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.[2] Soda cites performance artists such as Marina Abramović and Carolee Schneeman as artistic influences.[3][4] Since 2011, Molly Soda has worked out of Chicago, Detroit and New York.

Celebrity

Molly Soda started blogging as a teenager.[5] 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.[6] In 2011, she was involved in the emergence of seapunk microculture,[7] and became an occasional back-up dancer for techno-pop musician Grimes.[8]

Work

Molly Soda was first recognized by playing every character in Tween Dreams, that she presented in college as her senior thesis. 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.[9]

Soda's 2013 webcam video Inbox Full was presented at the Paddle8 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".[10][11]

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".[12]

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,[13] by providing a series of interactive spells to deal with technology.[14]

The vulnerability of the performer is reflected through Molly Soda's 2015 From My Bedroom to Yours, where Soda combined Tumblr aesthetic, kitsch and internet culture within a confessional space that reflected her own bedroom/studio.[15] 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.[16] Soda recreated "a sickly sweet aesthetic… a reclamation of what it is to be a female youth. Everything in the room is purposefully aestheticised, from the pink walls down to the drinks offered – a glass of rosé or mini Evian bottles, served on a pink gemstone printed plastic tablecloth. MacBooks, iPads and pink TV screens display the video works, and fake flowers, pink mirrors, and even a pink globe surround them".[17] 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".[18]

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).[19] Molly Soda, in an augmented reality project in collaboration with Nicole Ruggiero and the Berlin collective Refrakt, was awarded the 2017 Lumen Founders' Prize.[20]

Bibliography
  • Cheng, Susan, Pasori, Cedar, Silver, Leigh (December 9, 2013) "The Most Important Artists of 2013," Complex.
  • James-Wilson, Matthew (April 29, 2017) "Molly Soda," Forge. Issue 15.
  • Loftus, Jamie (September 6, 2016) "OG Digital Artist Molly Soda is Not the Face of Cyber-Feminism" Inverse.
  • Marshall, P. David and Redmond, Sean (2015) A Companion to Celebrity. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, p. 339
  • Mosey, Alice (March 30, 2015) “The Digital Artist Who’s Dating a Teddy Bear,” Dazed.
  • Mosey, Alice (June 17, 2015) "Molly Soda silences the haters" Dazed.
  • Pearce, Victoria (November 16, 2016) "Interview with the self-confessed 'Webcam Princess', Molly Soda," Spindle.
  • Raymer, Miles (January 12, 2012) "The week seapunk broke" Chicago Reader.
  • Rosenbohm, Randon (February 2017) "Alone with Molly Soda" Mask.
  • Shane, Emilie (December 9, 2015) "Molly Soda: From My Bedroom To Yours @ Annka Kulty’s Gallery” East London Lines.
  • Soda, Molly and Bystroem, Arvida, eds. (2017) Pics or It Didn't Happen: Images Banned From Instagram. London: Prestel

See also

References
  1. Molly Soda and Arvida Bystroem, eds. (2017) Pics or It Didn't Happen: Images Banned From Instagram London: Prestel ISBN 3791383078
  2. "Molly Soda". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  3. "INTERVIEW WITH THE SELF-CONFESSED 'WEBCAM PRINCESS', MOLLY SODA Spindle". Retrieved October 21, 2017.
  4. "Annka Kultys Gallery bio". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  5. "The Digital Artist Who's Dating a Teddy Bear". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  6. Marshall, P. David, Redmond, Sean A Companion to Celebrity, 2015, John Wiley & Sons, p. 339
  7. "The week seapunk broke". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  8. "Pitchfork 2012: Best and Worst of the Festival". Chicago magazine.
  9. "Molly Soda, Forge". Retrieved October 20, 2017.
  10. "Alone with Molly Soda". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  11. "Paddle8". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  12. "Molly Soda silences the haters". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  13. "Molly soda's internet spellbook can help you stop insta stalking your ex i-D". Retrieved October 21, 2017.
  14. "Want to banish trolls? A digital artist wrote a 'spellbook' for the Internet Splinter". Retrieved October 21, 2017.
  15. "Molly Soda @ Annka Kultys Gallery". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  16. "OG Digital Artist Molly Soda is Not the Face of Cyber-Feminism". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  17. "Molly Soda: From My Bedroom To Yours @ Annka Kulty's Gallery". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  18. "Molly Soda @ Annka Kultys Gallery". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  19. "Annaka Kultys Gallery bio". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
  20. "Lumen Prize". Retrieved October 19, 2017.
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