Lorena Molina

Solo exhibition- On view at Brea Gallery, April 25th-June 28th

https://www.breaartgallery.com/mica-2026-solo-show

For the past six years, I’ve been exploring questions of identity in the margins. I view the margins both as a place where extreme violence and pain happen, and as a place for resisting, dreaming, healing and thriving.

The images in, This must be the place, include still life arrangements, landscapes, and portraits that represent and attempt to piece together what my home in the margins looks like. As well as a reconciliation, acceptance and celebration of the immigrant experience that seeks to center my experience and place in the world outside of the trauma of displacement; thus creating a place that allows for joy, play, beauty, pleasure, slowness and decadence.

These images have been a site of ongoing experimentation, forming a growing catalog that resists the burden of representation and instead allows for nuance and play. The installation continues to evolve as I add new photographs, ecologies and objects, shifting alongside my understanding of place and belonging.

Included within the exhibition, Soy el clima extends this inquiry by bringing the body directly into the construction of landscape. Using breath, saliva, and other bodily traces, I alter photographic surfaces to blur the boundary between self and environment, positioning the body as an atmospheric force. I become the weather for my images.

Through a maximalist approach, I work against minimalist photographic traditions by embracing sensory excess, vibrant color, and dense layering. Tropical fruits and flora, shaped by histories of trade, exploitation, and migration, serve as both subject and material, evoking questions of labor, desire, and cultural identity. I deconstruct and reassemble plants entangled with colonial legacies, peeling back their visual and symbolic layers to reveal histories of power, extraction, and resistance.

Together, these gestures insist on a sensorial, embodied relationship to place, one that holds its violence while also honoring the wetness, heat, fruitfulness, resilience, and fire of the places and the people I adore. The work holds a layered sense of belonging, one that is not tied to a singular geography or fixed borders, but shaped through our movements, the body, our memories, and everyday lived experiences.

Image credit: Ryella Bar and Lorena Molina