2010 Pose Idea is a browser-based poem built with the marquee tag, the now-obsolete HTML element that once set text drifting endlessly across early web pages. Pulling images and text from the amateur modeling website Model Mayhem, Soda assembles a scrolling composition of borrowed poses that questions aspirational body image, desire, and staging oneself for an anonymous audience. The perpetual horizontal motion of the marquee operates as both form and metaphor, as language and image pass by, always in transit, never quite arriving. In this group show, the work reads the amateur web as an archive of longing, where the desire to be seen leaves behind its own accidental poetry.
Molly Soda (b. Amalia Soto) is a New York–based artist working in performance, video, and installation. At once an online user and artist, she participates in and subverts consumer technologies, unearthing their emotional undercurrents. Rising to prominence on Tumblr, Soda often combines collected digital ephemera with her personal archives.