Gabriel Esteban Molina, Works from The Great Divide series, 2019–21. Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix. Photo: Dennis Ha.
Gabriel Esteban Molina, The Great Divide II, from The Great Divide series, 2019–21. Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix.
Gabriel Esteban Molina, The Great Divide I, from The Great Divide series, 2019–21. Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix.
Gabriel Esteban Molina, The Great Divide XVII, from The Great Divide series, 2019–21. Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix.
Gabriel Esteban Molina, Works from The Great Divide series, 2019–21. Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix. Photo: Dennis Ha.
Gabriel Esteban Molina, The Great Divide II, from The Great Divide series, 2019–21. Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix.
Gabriel Esteban Molina, The Great Divide I, from The Great Divide series, 2019–21. Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix.
Gabriel Esteban Molina, The Great Divide XVII, from The Great Divide series, 2019–21. Courtesy of the Artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix.
Works from The Great Divide series
Growing up in the 1990s during the height of television saturation, Gabriel Esteban Molina’s studies in painting and sculpture coincided with the dawn of the internet and the rise of smartphones. His current practice focuses on lens-based media and the intersections of technology, experience, and memory. He is particularly interested in the potential cameras, screens, and other devices have to reflect our psychological, spiritual, and emotional states. Molina’s work often incorporates new technologies like 360-degree video, photogrammetry, and extended reality.
The Great Divide is a series that draws on the connection between photography and nostalgia through the use of nature images captured by Molina over the course of his life. In our current era of constant hardware and software updates – as well as the ever-changing conditions of our environment – the work highlights the precarity of digital media as a tool of preservation while playfully examining traditional landscape photography. The bands and squares are the result of errors in the loading of extremely high-resolution reshot and pixelated images, and reflect the fragmentary, exploitative, and materialistic perspective on nature in Western culture.
Presented in partnership with Booooooom, City of Richmond, and the Canada Line Public Art Project – InTransit BC.
