Sára Molčan | LOVE/MADNESS
As ephemeral as the media it represents, alum Sára Molčan (BFA, 2015) presents a new series of sixteen paintings looking at the way our careful curation of self and desire to remain ambivalent impacts our relationships. For one night only before disappearing like your favourite Instagram stories, you can catch her work on August 23 from 6 PM onwards.
Six of the paintings will be activated by AR using EyeJack (available on iOS/Android). It’s highly recommended you install this free app before arriving. RSVP below.
Canadian artist Sára Molčan (b. 1986) captures the universal desire to be liked through her large-scale paintings. Using herself as a vessel, Molčan’s work speaks to the careful curation of our own displays of emotions, our imperfect existence, and the ambivalence towards romantic partners in an effort to seem like you don’t care.
Known for her exploration of how social media penetrates daily existence, she questions and confronts the notions of our curated exposure of self-disclosure, sense of insecurity and the need to consistently reinvent ones’ brand.
“As an artist, I have become endlessly fascinated with this mask I wear – the inescapable reality of a millennial. The disingenuous mask of vulnerability and feeling I display online to seem personable; the casual indifference I display to the physical world. My curation of self is far more prevalent offline than online, so I question if I can merge these into a single identity,” says Molčan. “My calculated and critical performance of self is dictated through my experiences, including physical and emotional trauma; creating an intimate void that I seek to feel with likes and comments in the digital realm.”
Molčan’s work translates the ephemeral selfie into analog format, using technology as a veil of abstraction. Drawing inspiration from user interfaces, sexting, and identity play, her larger-than-life selfies demand to be removed from context and placed back in the digital world.