Everyone's sort of like always rep'ing a place that they're from. I think
that I've sort of just realized that the Internet is that space for me.
Growing up it was interesting and frustrating being someone that was born
in Puerto Rico who moved to Indiana out of all places where there are literally no
Puerto Rican people, and I think the reason that I went to the Internet was
to find a place where I felt like I belonged, in a sense. That doesn't mean
that it's like a perfect place, and it's not without its problems, and obviously
I'm like, super frustrated by it all the time, but it's the only place that I
could feel like I could really represent fully in a lot of ways. Right before I
graduated college is when I started noticing that things were sort of
changing. That was like the first time that I'd realized that people were
paying attention to me, because I had never had the idea that someone could
recognize me from the internet in real life.
My favorite thing about the work that I make is the misconceptions that people
have, because we're looking at each other online all day and we're just projecting
whatever it is onto each other, so I think it's really amazing that some
people interact with my work and they don't know that I'm an artist.
I sort of like when people look at my work who do know that I'm an artist, and
they don't think that it's art because they're like, "well what's the difference
between you and like, some famous person on YouTube or like, someone that takes
pictures of themselves?" [Molly reading: What are some of your favorite grime songs? I think
[Molly reading: you're beautiful and you inspire me, lol.] I think my piece "Inbox Full," which is a
piece of me reading my entire Tumblr inbox for ten hours that I recorded and
put on YouTube, is a huge piece for me. I really didn't know what I was doing at
the time. [Molly reading: Maybe we actually trust you to be honest with us baby.]
I was working retail, and I
thought that art was just going to be like a hobby for me, just like a lot of people
are conditioned to feel, and this curator, Lindsay Howard, she approached me and was
like, "I'm putting together this art auction. It's the first ever digital art
auction. Do you want to make a piece for it?" It's really hard
branching into sort of a more, like, art world context when everyone sort of sees
what you're doing as sort of low-brow or like too accessible or
whatever it is, and she was sort of really crucial, and really helped me a
lot like early on in my career. I just recently had a show called "I'm Just
Happy to Be Here." In the show you have a laptop that has a bunch of files on it that
you're meant to go through, sort of feeling like you would just be going
through someone else's computer and like looking at all their files. On the two
mirrors a very persistent man who is messaging me asking me to message him
back, and on the other one it's someone asking me, "is she real?" There's a karaoke
piece - so basically I recorded myself on Instagram Live. It's about 30 minutes
long, and as the video goes on you see the view count sort of drop, so you're
watching yourself become less and less relevant. I really wanted to capture the
sadness of performing for your camera. The way that we've all been conditioned
to be online has changed a lot, and I don't think anyone's having fun.
Everything's really based off of like numbers and getting 'likes' and really, I
think that it really just warps the way that we feel about ourselves, and I think
it really warps the way that we look at things. So I think that people need to
make conscious decisions to really surf the web and look for
things outside of what is immediately accessible. For me I had to really learn
everything by talking to other artists. And I also think that no one wants to
hear this, but the best thing that you can do is literally just keep making
work. And I think it's really good to actually be really transparent - like it's
sort of good to be like, "this is how much you should expect to get paid."
"This is how you should sell a piece of art. This is how you should do things." And I
think just opening up that dialogue and people being more helpful to each other
in that way will strengthen. I just feel really fortunate that I have sort
of a base or like a community that allowed that for me.