Sometimes eating at Sweetgreen is all it takes to feel like a girlboss. Drinking green juice? A clean girl. Drunkenly eating pizza? You’re a feral girl. Molly Soda, however, asks the question: “what type of girl eats a tuna sandwich?”
For the past decade, Molly’s art has engaged with consumption — on social media, in our shopping habits and through interactions with popular culture. Unconstrained by any one medium, she’s both performed a 10-hour reading of her Tumblr inbox and installed a HomeGoods-esque shelf of candles in the Jack Barrett Gallery. Now, she looks to consumption in its original, biological form: what we eat. With her new book of photography, Chick Magnet, Molly turns her focus to food, girls and the kitchen. There, she finds cabinets full of messy contradictions.
In her own kitchen, blue painter’s tape is used to attach images to the wall. A TikTok screenshot of a girl posing with her “daily diet coke” hangs next to a flash photo of Selena Gomez holding a slice of pizza in front of her face. Interspersed among the images, Molly has taped up photos of herself. She’s kneeling in front of a freezer, wearing bedazzled shorts in the produce aisle and balancing a carton of Almond Breeze in her palm. As such, her home looks a lot like the pages of Chick Magnet. The images all centre around women posing with, cooking and consuming food. The book’s cover features Molly’s own fridge. The other pages are filled with pictures she “found scrolling the internet, but a lot of it is performed,” she says. “Images that I saw, and maybe copied.”
“We’re all collecting images all the time. I’m really into digital clutter and hoarding files. I’m the only person I know with a printer,” Molly adds. “When I moved into this apartment, I started printing out everything and sticking it on my walls. To physically have images around you in a space — rather than on Tumblr or Pinterest or Instagram or whatever — gives you time to sit with them. That was the initial seed that would eventually become the book.”
On vision boards — spanning computer desktops, posters on bedroom walls and even starter pack memes — Molly identifies “the impulse to be a certain type of girl or manifest a specific goal”. “Vision boards… are the Girl Boss older sister to the tweenage notebook stuffed with magazine clippings,” she wrote on her blog. On her own vision board, however, Molly tells me she attempts to push the “feminine urge to collage” as far as possible. A video of Bella Hadid, dipping her face into a bowl of ice to “de-puff” on Instagram, becomes a subject of Molly’s emulation. But in its recreation, it ends up looking more like the unpleasant reality of the actual situation: cold and weird. But somehow still chic.
That aspirational impulse, when pushed by Molly, flattens out. She notices there are really only two types of girls eating online, “either the skinny girl with french fries or the wellness girly pouring a smoothie”. On Pinterest or Tumblr, there’s not a lot of room for the normal girls eating normal food. Or even weird girls eating “shitty looking fucking food”.
In Chick Magnet, we see a girl crying in the passenger seat of a car while presenting a “✨cute✨” Starbucks pink drink to the camera. It’s these moments — the raw, strange and distinctly modern — that Molly flattens and presents. The image is an unreadable chaos of competing signs. Like a Pinterest board, it reads as a sea of discrete objects. The pink drink, the running mascara, the hair braid and the TikTok interface each bring a different, hard-to-decipher element into an already dense symbolic soup. Much like her own work, it’s an “amalgamation of things”.
Recreating these images, Molly makes herself indistinguishable and anonymous. She’s transformed into “a girl in a sea of other girls on the internet,” she says. “I don’t think you know anything more about me from looking at Chick Magnet. If anything, I’m a stand-in. I’m into this flattening of the self, even flattening it by physically printing it out.” It’s hard not to pick up on the dissonance between the Molly Soda I’m sitting with — as she chats, giggles, scolds her cat and occasionally stumbles over her words — and the flat version in Chick Magnet.
Rather than making a simple statement, Molly’s reimagining of content amplifies some of modern life’s more confusing aspects. They’re given room to breathe and exist outside the wellness/pizza girly dichotomy. Molly deftly deflects my attempts to fit her work under one overarching thesis. She distracts by kindly complimenting an “astute observation” of mine, before seamlessly pivoting to show me a TikTok account documenting one man’s cigarette butts and beer cans. She doesn’t allow the scope of her work to be limited to simply girls, food, the kitchen or the internet. It’s about all those things at once — where they meet and much more. It’s not a flat critique of drive-through Midwestern consumerist Starbucks culture. In fact, we spent a good five minutes commiserating over how much living in New York makes us miss drive-through Starbucks. Talking broadly about her work, Molly admits that it’s “all really messy”. “I like existing in that,” she says. “But I don’t think people understand, it’s hard to be legible when you exist within that messiness.”
Molly laments the often reductive lens used when others evaluate her work. “Coverage of my work used to be like ‘oh look it’s an art show, but it’s all girls’. And, you know, I participated in that in my own way. But at the end of the day, it’s weirdly infantilising,” she explains. Molly, both in Chick Magnet and throughout her artistic career, has confronted the often illegible and never simple experience of modern life. When talking about her motivations, she doesn’t offer statements, but rather concepts she’s “interested in” or “thinking about”. Something is lost if you try to unravel the jumble, the messiness and the amalgam of Molly’s work. To fully appreciate it, I suggest giving up looking for a didactic message. Giggle along with her as you flip through the pages of Chick Magnet. Keep it on your coffee table for guests to consider. Take the pieces earnestly and ironically. Let the critique be natural and confusing. Pair the uncanny feast she’s cooked up with a tuna sandwich.
Credits
All photos courtesy of Molly Soda