Carmen Molina is a Bogotá-born artist based in Los Angeles.

Trained in photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York, she works across photography, works on paper, silk, and installation. Her practice explores photography as a medium for abstraction, transforming encounters with the material world into photographic compositions that evoke atmosphere, place, and material condition.

Photographing her experience of the world through the interplay of light, time, and the elemental—water, mineral surfaces, vegetation, and architecture across natural and urban environments—Molina gathers fragments from her surroundings and recomposes them into abstract works.

A residency at the Sanskriti Foundation, a museum and center for the arts in New Delhi, in 2014 marked a decisive shift in her practice. There, color emerged as language, and textiles were discovered as substrate. Photography became a tool not only for observation, but for transformation.

In 2015, Molina presented *THIS IS* at Galería Sextante in Bogotá, an exhibition that marked her transition toward abstraction and recomposition. The title referenced a central premise of the work: that the painterly images presented throughout the exhibition were, in their entirety, constructed from photography.

Over time, her interest in image, materiality, and perception led her to explore silk as a substrate. Drawn to the material's luminosity, fluidity, layers of history, poetry, and tactility, she began adapting her photographic compositions into this ancient textile, investigating how images might be experienced through its fibers, movement, and skin.

In 2019, Molina introduced her first silk adaptations in a collection of garments and home accessories under her own name through a pop-up presentation at Bergdorf Goodman in New York. The project marked an important step in extending her photographic practice beyond the wall and into lived experience.

This investigation eventually gave rise to CARMEN, a studio focused on adapting her photographic compositions into silk. Each adaptation reinterprets a composition through scale, surface, structure, and drape, allowing a single work to evolve across multiple expressions while remaining connected to its source.

Today, Molina's practice unfolds through an evolving archive of photographic compositions expressed across paper, silk, and space. Whether encountered as a work on paper, a silk adaptation, an installation, or a digital photographic composition, each work reflects an ongoing exploration of photography and its ability to transform across surface, form, and lived experience.