Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to present Comfort Zone, an exhibition of new works by Molly Soda. On view will be recent selfies and videos displayed on TV screens, iPads, laptops, and print and vinyl images mounted on walls, as well as resin sculptures.
The first encounter with American artist Molly Soda’s work will probably not occur in a traditional gallery or museum setting and may not even occur within a typical art context at all. Instead Soda has generated a significant online following for herself across various social media by sharing her works on platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. A self-described ‘webcam princess,’ Soda’s work spans the array of contemporary digital platforms, including Instagram selfies, YouTube videos, gifs, zines, web-based performance and tweets.
‘There is so much we look at online that goes un-mentioned, stored away into our digital memory bank’, notes Soda. Through the chaotic combination of prints and video works covering the gallery, Comfort Zone explores how we engage with the electronic devices which confront our everyday existence with a never-ending buzz of notifications and instant messages, both in our public and private spaces.
For her video All By Myself (2016), featured on a monitor within the show, Soda compiled 18 hours of footage taken from her MacBook’s PhotoBooth archive and publicly released the content en masse, content that was never intended to enter the public domain. Mounted on the walls of the gallery will be a series of C-prints on aluminium. Some feature selfies of the artist as she constantly shares images of herself via her social media presence, while others are reinterpretations of advertisements commonly seen on social media where the artist has intervened and cropped out the usual images and replaced them with photos of herself.
Comfort Zone brings together the artist’s exploration of how instant messaging, constant sharing, retweeting and ranking through likes, invades and permeates our lives today. All these technologies profoundly affect our concept of human identity and the relationship between the public and the private realms.
