AURORA MOLINA

Aurora Molina was born in La Havana, Cuba, in 1984. She emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, where she opted to pursue an education in art. Her life has always been surrounded by art, due to her father, German Molina, being himself an artist. Molina received her Associates of Arts in Visual Arts from Miami Dade College and her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Mixed Media from Florida International University and a Master in Contemporary Art from Universidad Europea de Madrid. She currently resides in Miami, Florida, where she works as a full time artist.

My work is concerned with the objectification of beauty, the growing anonymity of the elderly in our society, and the obsessiveness of blending in or fitting in the society’s gaze. I believe a clear connection exists between the media-fueled manipulation, edification and standardization of physical beauty and the increasing denial of the actual process of physical aging. To be old today is to slowly become invisible. In the “Gerontos Series” ( Elders ) I dealt with the everyday lives of the elderly in our postmodern society through a series of works ranging from photographs, videos , sculptures, street art and  installation to curatotial work. In today’s culture the elderly are carefully hidden from society's gaze. Implicit Ageism explores the multiple issues related to society's dismissive attitude towards the elderly, reaffirming in the process the need to respect our elders. My work is, in many ways, a critique of this postmodern iconography as it attempts to highlight not only the natural process of aging but society’s concomitant refusal to recognize it as such. The obsession with youth and physical beauty often results in an infantilization of society which steeped in narcissism, becomes a society of spectacle. My pieces attempt to draw attention to the ways in which this self-absorption is encouraged by an unfettered individualism which unchallenged serves only to fracture family ties, friendships and the larger social consciousness, creating and awkward integration when the individual does not conform to the established standards. I examine this growing need to connect by focusing on individual narratives. Whereas society has slowly created “fictions” and “virtual realities” to replace the real, I instead direct the spectator’s attention to the everyday real happenings of ordinary lives. We can see this in the installation piece “ Socially commune Portraitures” wherein I present a body of work as a critique of those portraits of alienation. They are immigrants, workers, painters, neighbors, and people on the streets. Their commonality transcends economic status and ethnic background. They are equally represented. It is not a piece about individuals but rather a conglomerate of individuals with 65 head portraits and 10 full portraits put together as an installation.

            There’s an undeniably playful aspect to all of my work. The soft sculptural creatures I make are created as if they were belligerent, ill-behaved children, demanding attention. In the most recent series, I have created an environment where man has become and anthropoid-like creature and it is exclusively the animal instinct that drives his behavior. These anthropoidals coexist in a habitat devoid of any established human law and where the relationship between their different personalities makes them react intuitively. In this habitat there is symbolic representation of differently created stereotypes, representing social values present in human groupings. This hierarchal foundation will be based on the medieval four humors, where each characters will represent one of the four temperaments, melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric. The Absurd is seen in either man’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by an invisible outside force. To be able to exist in this world, to extract some sort of meaning, man must take the form of an athropoidal, not longer burdened by strict social sanctions imposed by society but rather driven by sheer instincts, acting viscerally and spontaneously. The question of morality is rendered tribal in this habitat of surrealist autonomies and becomes a setting of absurdity. This is a world where insanity and reason not only intersect but establish a relationship. There is nothing preconceive or established, not rules or laws. Instead we are dealing with the collective unconscious, which according to Carl Jung, is how the personal unconscious integrates with the collective unconscious, each anthropodial achieving a state of individuation, or wholeness of self, respecting others actions and responding parallel to that. These are creatures that are funny, frightening, incongruous-looking, part human, part animal, and intentionally grotesque. The anthropomorphic aspect of the pieces is the animal that wants to become human. My use of stocking make them appear crude, more visceral, as if the skin had been removed to reveal what’s beneath, to expose the rawness of tissue and blood. Indeed, it is the grotesque nature of these pieces that is meant to invite deeper explorations into the true nature of the character, a repulsiveness that seduce the spectator to reexamine his or her own psychological vulnerabilities.

            The use of fabric and the obsessiveness of embroidery defines my work and honors that centuries-old legacy of women weavers and artisans. The embroidery machine facilitates a delicate and yet frenetic pace, a feminine challenge to the male patriarchy of brush and canvas, and allows me the chance to deconstruct the phallocentric iconography still central to the art world today. Every time I sew, I connect the tension of my foot on the pedal to the movement of my hands as I guide the fabric’s surface into what I want to draw. The exercise becomes a ritual; as if I were holding a palette with one hand and a brush with the other, ready to release all those impulses onto the canvas surface.