DANKA LATORRE X MARY LINDSTROM INTERVIEW 2025

       The fragmented phantasmagoric cyber barrage of images and information we are forced to consume daily has become a staple of modern life. From gut-wrenching news of violent genocide followed by inticing sexualized self-aware thirst traps, to parasocial relationships and bubbles of hyper-curated content of one's liking - all an incomprehensible nonsensical assault on the senses elliciting an overwhelming melange of clashing emotions in the matter of mere seconds. An experience that's ingratiated itself into everyone's routine existence. Gratification, obsession, sexualization, voyeurism, detachment, dehumanization, idolization - all comprise interdependent by-products of the digital age. Danka Latorre is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY, whose practice mirrors these multi-dimensional dynamics of the human psyche that are catalyzed by the cyber sphere. Her works are a seductive siren call imbued with a phantasmagoric quality of a technological dreamworld, her process metaphorical to that of the experience of the online space. Danka Latorre acutely captures the dilemmas, dramas and dichotomies of the contemporary tech-drenched zeitgeist.  

-Mary Lindstrom 

The culmination of summer marks Danka Latorre’s participation in Queue Gallery’s inaugural group show, Memory Stick, featuring her piece Acceptance Wedding. Danka’s work is also currently on view at Alyssa Davis Q3 in New York.

Mary Lindstrom: Your works encompass a broad range of mediums - inkjet prints, gum bichromate on watercolor paper, salt and silver nitrate on canvas, UV prints on acid tab sheets, and even makeup. It is tempting to draw a parallel between the visual space of the online age, in which we consume a fragmented amalgamated barrage of media, and your breadth of execution. Does this comparison resonate and what compels you to explore a certain medium?

Danka Latorre: I think my practice is relatively desperate, searching through the infinite debris of the internet and trying to hold onto fragments before they disappear. I usually choose a medium based on what tension it holds with the image, sometimes I want the medium to resist and complicate it, like gum bichromate. Other times the photo has already decayed through the digital manipulation I put it through, so it gets printed on inkjet paper and soaked in epoxy, making it live forever.  Gum bichromate is the medium I gravitate to the most, it has a dreadfully(positive) repetitive aspect to it, while UV printing on the acid tabs feels too quick and sharp. I like catching myself in contradictions and hypocrisy. Some materials hint to the body, makeup, tape, nail polish, while others lean towards surveillance, chemistry, and decay. I really like when the material list helps guide the conversation with the depicted media. The materiality contrast feels like the same emotional structure of scrolling: seductive, overwrought and then suddenly abusive. So I feel like the comparison really resonates. I choose mediums that convolute the meaning of the source image instead of clarifying it. 

Lindstrom: A common thread throughout your body of work, both in sourcing imagery and visual quality, is an ephemeral sense of fluidity of fate, organized chaos and chance encounters - sentiments siphoned from the randomized nature of cyberspace. What aspect of this appeals to you and draws you in? 

Latorre: I like that idea of organized chaos. That’s probably where I feel most genuine in my practice. So much of what we encounter online feels random, but it's structured by invisible algorithms that are meant to feel aimless until you look closer. The internet gives us this illusion of chaos and choice, but it’s deeply designed. I like playing the fake game of spontaneity and curated accidents. In my process, I try to leave a lot of space for “accidents” that choose when to appear, ink that pools wrong (I put too much down on purpose), chemicals that stain (I left them on for too long intentionally), and photos that show up on my instagram feed that morning (gods will). It’s halfway between being pulled into the algorithm and pulling the algorithm apart with your hands. A surrender, while still desperately trying to seize control, over what will remain, what will scar, and what might seep through into something tender or violent, usually both. The internet feels like that to me. So does memory. So does desire. I want my work to hold both ends of that.

Troxler Sister 01, 2024

24 x 36 in, Inkjet print, duct tape, biodegradable plastic bubbles.

Lindstrom: Your work touches upon many intersecting themes: pop culture, the digital age and its feedback loops of perception, as well as the experience of being female, which is a loaded experience always subject to the sexualizing male gaze - is there any particular sentiment or notion you hope to instill or evoke in the viewer through exploring this theme? Would you subscribe to the notion of your work being feminist?

Latorre: I would say yes, but not in a fixed or prescriptive way. I don't think I'm trying to define what being a woman is, or how femininity should function. My work tries to observe and distill what it feels like to be looked at, duplicated, adored, discarded, sexualized, and performed, especially online. Just a residue of what it means to exist inside a girl body that’s constantly rendered legible, desirable, clickable, and marketable. If it comes across as feminist, I hope it’s because it forces the viewer to sit with that tension, to question how images of women are used, and how we participate in their exploitation. I can't really offer any answers since I’m still looking for them. It's all a stage, a space where obsession, seduction, and harm coexist. That’s what makes it feel honest to me. Feminism doesn't feel clean or resolved, it's kinda sticky, damaged, and complicit.

Pop culture is an unavoidable language, it’s where so many of our ideas about femininity, power, and worth are rehearsed. I think a lot about the feedback loop you brought up, the idea that we become the image we watch ourselves being. In that way, I want my work to feel a bit slippery. At first glance she might seduce you, and then her gaze snaps back and interrupts it all just to recognize the violence, pleasure, and passivity that exist side by side when we view women’s bodies and digital images alike. 

A trap that lures you in only to expose how you look, how you want, and what you’ve learned to consume. Stuffing screenshots into gum bichromate skins that bleed from the seams, like a playdate gone violent. There's allure and exploitation twined together.

If that’s feminism, maybe it should leave a heart shaped bruise. 

 Lindstrom: A lot of your work overlaps with seduction and harm. Do you ever feel the need to censor or soften an image? Is it more important for you to amplify tension - what's your perspective on that?

Installation of Danka Latorre and Diego Gabaldon in current QUEUE Exhibition, Memory Stick.

Latorre: Softening an image really came into play with the Daughter series that we talked a bit about (sexdolls turned real girls). When I was working on them I wanted to make the viewer have an empathetic response to this normally sexualized “object”, in that way I did treat the Daughters with more care in the darkroom compared to my current series, The Troxler Sisters. By softening the Daughter images they became more human-esque. Part of the gum bichromate process is submerging the print face down underwater, which is inherently just a violent action to do. With the Daughters it felt like a bath followed by tender hair brushing but with the Troxler sisters, that are meant to be a bit more intimidating, I would splash them around, facedown in the water. Waterboarding them but still with a twisted motherly love “I’m only doing this because I love you”. So I think in terms of softening an image that series is the one that comes to mind where I've been the most cautious, from the start I was like okay I need to be gentle but usually that’s not the case.

Lindstrom: Yeah. 

Latorre: I've had to very physically actually censor some of my work online. I got banned off Instagram like three times, not fully banned, but they shut down my account for a few days. Are you familiar with Sommer Ray?

Lindstrom: No, I don't think so. 

 Latorre: So, when I first had Instagram in middle school, she was I guess the first version of what we see as an Instagram influencer, back when we just called them Instagram models. All she would do is post pictures of herself in the mirror with her butt showing, that was just all she did. I had a bunch of images of her like that from 2014 and then I imposed them onto explosions. I looked up iPhone explosion backgrounds and composed them together and cast them in glow in the dark resin. I had to censor those when I was posting them because I would get banned if I didn't blur her butt, I think I also got restricted on tumblr a few times too. Which is crazy because I screenshotted the photos off of her own Instagram, but they were censoring mine.

Lindstrom: Yeah I guess that's also sort of the paradox of the internet, when it's attempting to protect but it's just already done so much damage in so many ways. So you've described your work as a trap that seduces only to expose how we look and consume. How do you imagine the viewer's role in this? Are they complicit, implicated? Do you see them as a participant in a shared vulnerability? 

Latorre:  I would say so. I mean, I can't view my work for the first time, but I feel like if I were to imagine doing it, I would feel a bit of shame and guilt, but also I would relate to it. I don't know how a man would view my work. That's something that bothers me to think about. I kinda want them to feel a bit of guilt. I want it to be as if they didn't choose to feel guilty, to force that upon them, I don't think they do tho. I mean, it's just unconsensual when you walk into a gallery - whatever you see is unconsensual. You’re not consenting to whatever you see online, you're not consenting to all of the gore and the sexualized things that you see, it's not consent. So I think when you see them in person, it kind of mimics that. 

Lindstrom: You just mentioned that it kind of bothers you to think how a man might see it. Do you fear feeding into the same loop of the images being oversexualized and all the nuances are lost upon them? 

Latorre: Yeah I don't know, I mean it's something that's bothered me a lot in the past few months, which maybe it shouldn't. I have had a positive reaction from people online telling me that they like my work and most of the time the comments and dms are from guys. That’s been something that makes me question if I'm doing everything wrong? I don't know. I feel if I saw my work, I would really resonate with it. It’s just confusing to me what they're relating to, I don't understand what they're relating to. I don't know if maybe they're more inclined to reach out and say that they like people's work or if it clears their conscious, I don't really know what to think of it. I mean, I appreciate everyone's support, and I'm very thankful. And if I am feeding into the loop, which sometimes I am, it's sort of inevitable, women are just always bound to it, I try to comment on it but I can't escape it.

Lindstrom: When we previously discussed your piece Acceptance Day you talked about a parallel between religion and society's propensity for worshipping pop culture icons [Selena and Hailey's relationship with Justin Bieber], as well as the infinite nature of the digital realm which is analogous to the multitude of Hindu gods depicted in the piece. Could you expand a bit more on those themes and your thoughts in relation to the piece as well as the inclusion of Hindu iconography? 

Latorre: The way people choose sides in a celebrity narrative (Team Hailey vs. Team Selena) mirrors the kind of emotional investment people have in religion. There's reverence, obsession, and betrayal. I wanted this piece to treat that spectacle with the same formal seriousness we give to religious iconography, not as satire, but as a way to evaluate it and ask: what are we actually worshipping with the hours we devote to our online presence?

There’s also a temporal quality I was thinking about: how a single image can hold decades of cultural meaning while also becoming a throwaway reblog. With Acceptance Day, I wanted to create a devotional image that was both sacred and synthetic, sincere and hyper-mediated, the paradox we’re in. The Hindu iconography came from thinking about multiplicity and forcible forgiveness, the way Hindu gods often have many arms, many faces, multiple versions of themselves. It felt like a proper metaphor for the internet’s endless mirrors: every person existing in thousands of forms, reposted, remixed, reinterpreted. Selena as a pop star, as a meme, as an ex-girlfriend, as a deity. The work isn’t about literal religion, but about belief systems, how we assign meaning to people we don’t know, how we project our desires onto them, and what they end up symbolizing to us. Both beautiful and terrifying. 

Selena Gomez will live forever and there's nothing you can do about it. 

Mary Lindstrom is an artist and writer, she received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. Mary’s paintings interact with theosophical, occult and transcendental themes and self-generated symbol systems

that navigate between the earthly and the ethereal. Her writing focus covers contemporary art criticism and culture.