Lens based artist Estefany Molina presents the first of three experiences that highlight the artist’s photographic series titled “nightswimming.” The first event will be held at Matchbook Distilling Co. in Greenport on Saturday, May 21, from 5 to 8 PM. The show is also in collaboration with Stephen Klipp, who designed and built the lightboxes that will be displayed.
We caught up with Molina to learn more.
Talk a little about your background as a photographer and your artistic process.
I am a Latin American lens based artist with a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. My professional experience has been varied having freelanced for Edible East End, Fast Company, and the NY Post. Generally, my personal work is conceptually driven. Time plays a big element. I am broadly inspired by the nuances of my own life photographing in feeling and in stride.
Tell us about your ‘nightswimming’ body of work.
“nightswimming” is a mediation on transience and connection through the vulnerability of the subject. Using the night, the sea, and time the images become intimate glimpses into something sacred. Behind this liminal veil of glitch and grain, the occult is revealed.
In “nightswimming,” I am recreating a memory from a time that I consider my own year of magical thinking. It is a memory that stuck with me for a few years before starting this work, and compelled questions that drove me to create these photographs. I have not been able to answer my questions. We all have encountered moments in life where the floor has fallen out from under us unexpectedly. Moments that have dramatically shifted what we thought our lives would become and have made us question our own judgements and perceptions. Moments where we have had to learn, again, how to swim, how to trust, how to be in the world. It’s a re-wilding. Through this deeply personal work I have relearned to trust my own intuition.
Each of my chosen subjects were in midst of some kind of becoming or transition, and they were photographed almost immediately upon asking. Whether it was the falling in love or the loss of it; the start of a new era or the end of an old; an oscillation; a change in trajectory; self realization. Moments of great change are incredibly sensitive, and in my own sensitivity I sought out others with that same vulnerability. In layman’s terms: I was chasing a vibe that matched my own. I let my intuition guide me towards a feeling that my eyes could otherwise not see. This may seem counterintuitive, but this is the very nature of photography. It is writing with light, through time, with our subconscious mind.
The easiest way to explain this is through your Instagram feed. Not through the curation of your front facing profile, but through the record of images that you’ve liked on the backend feed. Depending on the degree of awareness with which you “liked,” all together this feed becomes an aggregate of images that reveal what we inherently desire and aspire to be. In this case, you are not necessarily “making” pictures, but you are choosing a decisive moment, generally considered the essence of a photograph. Choice, like much of human behavior, is largely subconscious. Vulnerability reveals the subconscious. And it is only through looking back and connecting these dots do you recognize the direction you were heading in all along.
You’re having an event featuring this work, the first of three one-night-only experiences, at Matchbook Distilling Co. in Greenport. Tell us more about that and what guests can expect.
Expect to be transported through a sensory voyage of light, sound, and spirits! I’ve collaborated with local carpenter, Stephen Klipp, with the design and build of eleven custom 3 x 3 foot light boxes for this series. They will be displayed in some of the industrial pockets of Matchbook Distilling Co, located at 230 Corwin Street in Greenport. Matchbook’s tasting room apothecary will be open from 3 to 8 PM, during which you may delight in their spirits and tour the facilities. They also feature a limited tasting menu by Cameron Trezoglou.
Matchbook Distilling Co. is an R&D facility dedicated to bespoke contract production of spirits. They champion agriculture, anthropology, tradition, and science. To me, it’s almost a natural pairing. The industrial background of the bottling room, the production floor, the rick house; it’s all about process. Something about the process of distilling, even natural wine making (they have a small area for wine), reminds me so much of being in the darkroom and just the photo practice all together. The mixing, timing, agitation, the waiting, adjusting along the way, the alchemy; a bit of blind faith. Each bottled spirit feels like a photograph to me. Also, there is something to that blurry liminal haze that you can sense from these images that can relate to a loss of inhibition, which generally does occur when we experience these sorts of elixirs.
How is your work inspired by the North Fork?
My entire life has revolved around the North Fork. It has been the landscape for all of the loves and throws of my life. However, I am not the local with generationally entrenched roots. In fact, I am a transplant that just so happens to have lived here for nearly 30 years. There are things that I wish to feel, see, and experience that are not necessarily here. But the only way to fill such voids is by creating these experiences myself. So I take inspiration from that difference. It is in everything I do.
