Lorena Molina

Exhibition on View at Art League Houston,
Main Gallery January 17 – April 11, 2025

“Becoming Sticky”, the first collective of Central American lens-based artists, delves into the sensuous and political power of atmospheres. For our debut exhibition, we frame ‘equatorial vision’ to highlight the feminine, queer, and magical qualities of weather-rain, humidity, volcanic heat, and lush life.

As individual members of the collective, Tesora Garcia, Lorena Molina, and Martin Wannam each challenge Eurocentric views and use of photography, making photographs that challenge concepts of ownership and colonial use of lenses to mark others as different. In its place, we alter the climate, make friends with animal and mineral spirits, and weep alongside the planet’s grief. What would it mean to make photographs that sweat or cameras that erupt in indignant anger?

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In Soy El Clima, for the becoming Sticky collective, my photographs engage with both images of the land in El Salvador and the corporeal, incorporating my breath, saliva, and other bodily fluids to disrupt, distort, and transform atmospheric conditions within the images. Through these intimate interventions, I blur the boundary between self and environment, making the body an active force in shaping the landscape. Alongside these organic manipulations, I employ a maximalist aesthetics—layering vibrant colors, rich textures, and sensory excess to challenge minimalist visual traditions in photography.

Tropical fruits, imbued with histories of trade, exploitation, and migration, serve as both subject and material, evoking questions of labor, desire, and cultural identity. Similarly, I deconstruct and reassemble plants deeply entangled with colonial legacies, peeling back their visual and symbolic layers to reveal histories of power, extraction, and resistance embedded within them.

If this land has both loved me and marked me, then through my body, I inscribe myself back upon the land. My physical presence marks the environment, leaving traces of my touch and myself within it. In this act, I do not merely observe the landscape; I become its weather.

The studio made images are paired with photographs made in El Salvador that contextualize this Equatorial vision and highlight the joy, pleasure, its wetness, the fruitfulness, the resilience and the heat, and fire of the places and the people that I adore so dearly.