For more information about this piece see: “Love spirals: notes on brown feelings,” Future/present: Arts in a Changing America, Duke university Press, 2024
J. Molina-Garcia (she/her) is a Salvadoran-American media artist, writer, and educator. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Futures at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. A citizen of the Global South and an American Dreamer, J’s research engages mystical and esoteric traditions of ancient Mesoamerica, Pan African spirituality, and Buddhist/Hindu sects. In this pursuit, she synthesizes marginalized realms of knowledge alongside science, science-fiction, non-western philosophy, and leftist political theory.
Her aesthetic output takes on an epic scale, creating immersive physical and psychic environments that use lens-based and time-based technologies to transport viewers into non-physical realms. Her work is not only interdisciplinary, but multidimensional, functioning like a perceptual wormhole that attempts to ignite a viewer’s unconscious spiritual and cognitive abilities. Through heavy-handed alteration of photographic imagery, darkroom experiments, and performance projects that center her body as a transwoman, she elicits visionary experiences and emancipatory phenomena.
J. holds an MFA degree in Photography+Extended Media from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and graduated with dual degrees in Photography and Art History from the University of North Texas.
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