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.
Molly Soda started blogging as a teenager. 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. In 2011, she was involved in the emergence of seapunkmicroculture, and became an occasional back-up dancer for techno-pop musician Grimes.
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. Soda's 2013 webcam video, Inbox Full, was presented at the Paddle8digital 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". In 2015, as part 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". Soda's Virtual Spellbook on the internet platform NewHive, addresses agency within technology at the same time as making fun of the traditionally female perspective of Wicca, by providing a series of interactive spells to deal with technology. 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 with in a confessional space that reflected her own bedroom/studio. 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. 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". 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, Los Angeles, Bloomington and London, England. Molly Soda, in an augmented reality project in collaboration with Nicole Ruggiero and the Berlin collective, Refrakt was awarded the 2017 Lumen Founders' Prize.
