For artist Sára Molčan, painting selfies doesn't always mean she's painting herself, or at least, not exactly, herself. “My painted self is me but not really me. There’s a strange disconnect for people — they really want to believe I’m painting myself,” she says. Instead, Molčan’s oil paintings grapple with the broader curated context of online representations people portray on social media by using provocative images of selfies, text messages, and iOS notifications.

In the months since the pandemic began, Molčan’s approach to social media curation and relationships has taken on new meaning since more people's lives have moved online. While she notes that the pandemic hasn’t changed her approach to painting, she’s always been interested in how people interact with her work, and the pandemic has given audiences a new perspective. “It has changed the context in the way that people view the work. Now, it makes people view it as what society and relationships are going to become. Existing online is no longer a choice, but a requirement of being in the world now,” says Molčan.

From this new lens, her 2019 piece, Feels so Good, takes on a technologically-exhausted sentiment. Originally, it was about “a relationship that may or may not be going somewhere.” Now, with the increased use of technology to form and develop relationships, people “don’t have a choice but to engage in these technological ways…reading messages is exhausting,” she laughs.

Molčan’s work has developed into a complex dialogue between technological and analogue approaches to self-representation. For some viewers, that’s what draws them to her work. They can see a side of themselves in the version of Molčan she’s depicting. “Throughout the pandemic, I’ve had people quarantined at home alone coming across my work and being like, ‘I’m so glad I found this,’ and, ‘I’m not alone in feeling this way.’”

Other times, she notices the subjects in her work seem to provoke discomfort in people. “It confronts them with something that they weren’t willing to admit to themselves. Confronting people with their own bias, their fear of intimacy, or in the cases of relationships; it’s a romanticization of the past.” Facing biases during a pandemic might seem like lemon in the wound of self-isolation and physical distancing, but it’s all part of the paradoxes Molčan explores; the blurring of fact and fiction and how we confront our prejudices.

Some people feel provoked by the body that Molčan represents. “It’s usually other women who get quite upset about the representation of a larger body, and I think it's simply because I’m daring to take up space in a world where women have been told to shrink themselves,” she says. Her subjects are not shrinking violets either, and their streaked mascara, bondage cuffs, and raised middle fingers might not fit some viewers’ perspectives on ‘lady-like’ representation. Still, it’s those tropes that Molčan is pushing up against in her work.

During this year's Eastside Culture Crawl, Molčan will participate in live painting events producing two paintings and interacting with audiences over Instagram Live and Twitch. She's also using Augmented Reality (AR) features to allow the viewer to interact with her paintings through a scannable QR code. When a viewer holds their phone's camera in front of the AR activated paintings, an iOS notification may pop up. Of using AR in her work, Molčan says it was a natural progression: “What’s so ironic or comical is I’m constantly already pushing the lines between the digital and analogue: taking a selfie, painting it, and putting it back on the internet. Now add AR; now it’s a digital-analogue that you can only experience when you’re in front of the work.”

But as Black Mirror-esque as her work already is, Molčan wants to take it a step further: “I would love for people to be able to interact with my work without needing a QR code. In an ideal world, they’d be able to interact with the animation. It’d be like a choose your own adventure. I know it’s possible. The technology is there.”

Find information on Molčan’s live stream painting events on Instagram. You can also visit her website here.

The Eastside Culture Crawl runs November 12-15 & 19-22.

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Painting the Future of Selfies