Jake Molter
 by Iker Veiga



Winona Ryder CCTV, 2024
7”x9”
Cross Stitch on fabric

All images courtesy of the artist

Jake Molter (2002) received his BFA in Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in 2024. His artistic production spans a wide range of media, from oil painting and pastel to needlepoint or cross stitch.

Molter’s work is perhaps best described in Lady Gaga’s words: “unafraid to reference, or not reference.” While his practice is saturated with images extracted from pop culture, it resists clinical mimicry. Each of his pieces is imbued with viscerality in every mark, exploring vulnerability as seen in characters written by Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier, as well as in figures such as Anna Nicole Smith or Lena Dunham. The artist destabilizes our voyeuristic relationship to these icons, unveiling their humanity, and challenging the psychological flatness (and the literal two-dimensionality) of the media imaginings that have shaped their rise and demise in the public eye.

Ahead of Feet Pics, his new group exhibition opening at Ruby/Dakota on January 9, 2026, Molter sits down with Basta to discuss the relationship between his art, film, and the Internet, and his approaches to mark-making across media.

IKER: Can you walk us through your creative process, from image selection to the finished work? 
JAKE: I’m always looking for images. I have a huge folder on my computer where I just save everything that’s interesting, or funny, or scary, or whatever to me. Sometimes I’ll look for specific things. For example, I really like going on The Wayback Machine on TMZ.com and looking at headlines from around 2010 to 2015. It’s really enjoyable to do because the pictures and text together are really striking and funny, and they have an element of trashiness that I think doesn’t really exist so overtly anymore. 



Zayn Malik Caught Smoking Weed In Peru, 2025
7.5”x9.5”
Cross Stitch on Fabric

So, when I begin to make a piece, I might have something in mind, or I might comb through my folder to get inspired. In my paintings, I work really quickly, and often I’ll paint the full image in an hour, but then blur it by scraping its layers off and reapplying paint—a process that normally takes 5 to 10 repetitions until I’m satisfied. For my cross-stitching, it’s slower and more repetitive. I select an image, choose my thread colors, and generate the pattern for it. Then, I just go through and fill in the picture stitch by stitch, which is a months-long process that I normally do in my spare time at home, while watching movies. 

                                 

Tippi Crying, 2023, & SELMASONG, 2024
10”x8” & 6”x6”
Oil on Panel

I: When did this habit of media hoarding begin? Tár, Funny Games, or allusions to Lena Dunham are ubiquitous in your production. Are there other particular images, films, or forms of media that have shaped how you think, or that you have returned to obsessively over time since you first started making art?

J: I got into making artwork based on referential and appropriated imagery in my junior year at Pratt Institute. Prior to that, I had been making art primarily about nuclear apocalypse, grim speculative futures, and stuff like that since high school. I had a really debilitating fear of nuclear war, so I chose that subject matter because I thought my pieces had to be really deep, personal, and revelatory. 

That eventually became boring to me. I felt a bit constricted. So I started making small pieces for fun on the side. I had a thing where I would try to draw the poster of Brendan Fraser in The Whale from memory every day in my studio, and that was pretty freeing. And then I realized I could just draw celebrities and films (which I really enjoyed) in a more collected, artistic way. 



Funny Game #2, #3, #4, 2024
12”x12”
Oil on Panel

My grandpa was very into needlepoint when I was a kid and he made really elaborate images. He taught me some of it, but I forgot how to do it over the years. I was on a roadtrip a few summers ago and thought it would be cool to bring that back, so I learned how to do needlepoint on YouTube and worked on it in the car. At this point, it was just for fun, and I didn’t really view it as part of my artistic practice. The first needlepoint piece I made was a picture of Lydia Tár because I really love her character and the movie. I had it in my studio one day when somebody came in and said that it was the most interesting thing in the room. Soon, I realized that by working with imagery I liked, without trying to over-intellectualize my art, I had opened a new field of exciting ideas, images, and practices to work with. 



The Lydia Tár Cross Stitch

I: Your work draws from a wide range of sources, from “intellectual” European cinema such as The Piano Teacher to Instagram content (that blue-black dress…) How do these visual and cultural worlds coexist within your practice? Do you see your work as commenting on distinctions between “high” and “low” culture?

J: I do try to comment on that to some degree. There’s a lot of people talking about Internet juxtaposition in art these days, and I find a lot of it over-analyzed and irritating. The fact that in my daily life, I will watch a movie like The Piano Teacher, or Tár, or Opening Night or something, and then go on Twitter or Instagram reels for hours on end is interesting and funny in itself. 

My art is not a commentary on the difference between “high” and “low,” but more of a statement that these are both similar forms of media existing in the 2020s—both of which I consume equally. I don’t really notice the difference in their respective level of “culture” anymore. They just blend into a lexicon of items I enjoy and am drawn to. 

That said, I am interested in the contrast between highbrow and lowbrow in terms of the relationship between “content/process” as opposed to “content/content.” Particularly in cross stitch, which is a crafty, antiquated format that requires time and precision, very much opposite to trashy tabloid pictures. 

I: Let’s talk more about needlepoint and cross stitch. These techniques have long been associated with craft, labor, and care. The act of threading an image together suggests attentiveness to both form and meaning, as you mention. Given that most of the photographs you cross-stitch reflect career-deaths or celebrity tragedies, do these ideas factor into your practice?

J: I was drawn to cross stitch in particular because of how each mark is just the same gesture over and over. Each stitch is similar to a pixel, but also requires labor and tedious repetition. I like how the medium allows me to turn a digital image into a physical, three-dimensional object in a way that painting can’t really duplicate. 

When I started cross-stitching, I was interested in celebrity autopsies and celebrity deaths in general. The act of putting together thousands of stitches to create an image felt very important to the autopsies themselves. There’s also an element of time that’s added to it: while a digital photo is disposable—generated and seen in an instant—, these become laborious and they require commitment and obsession. 

         

Diana Crash, 2023
4.2”x5.5”
Cross Stitch on Fabric


At first, I was very interested in the possibility that celebrities, being sort of unattainable and universally recognized faces, are the most human and relatable to us only when pictured dead or during their downfalls. With time, I have strayed away from this slightly, because it’s kind of edgy and not what I want to talk about anymore. But when I was starting this, cross stitch was the perfect metaphor for that idea. 

Now, as I mentioned, I’m more interested in the stitch as a pixel, and in working with social media and tabloid culture through that lens. I explore how pixelization can make an image three-dimensional while stripping it down to its bare essentials. By using the same marks over and over, I try to shift these fleeting images into permanent ones. For example, with my cross stitch of the black and blue/white and gold dress, I wanted to materialize the illusion of the ambiguous color into a tangible item that still had the same effect. I have recently begun thinking of my cross stitch work as documenting or preserving Internet moments in real space.



The Dress (Stop Fighting), 2025
7”x5”
Cross Stitch on Fabric

I: Mark-making is central to your practice across multiple media, beyond cross stitch (oil, pastel…) How does each medium speak to you, and how do you decide which is appropriate for a given work?

J: I’ve been very into oil painting ever since I started working with it in 10th grade, particularly in portraiture. I like being able to be really expressive while using a medium like oil, which carries a weight to it and feels very regal and rich. In terms of celebrity portraiture, I like being able to capture movement and expression in a way I think only oil can really do: it can be very fluid but also very intense and static. I started using oil pastel when I found myself missing the speed and pure gesturality of drawing with charcoal, which pastel can duplicate well, while still adding the texture and pigment of oil paint. Additionally, in some of my paintings, I place horizontal brush streaks of gesso across the surface so that the piece will read as fluid, but also leave slight streaks of color that evoke CRT or VCR lines. 

   

Isabelle Huppert Stabbing Herself, 2024, & Bess McNeill, 2023
10”x8” & 8”x10”
Oil Pastel on Panel, Oil on Panel

When working on something, I may choose other media based on what emotion or feeling an image exudes, or I want it to exude. For example, I used colored pencils to evoke a romantic, dreamy feeling, in pieces I’ve done of Anna Nicole Smith’s wedding, or Tom Brady kissing his son on the mouth. 


       

Tom Brady Kissing His Son, 2025, & Sweet and Tender Hooligan (Anna and Marshall), 2025, & Diana Dodi St. Tropez, 2025
8.5”x11” & 14”x18”
Colored Pencil on Paper & Oil on Canvas

I: In your 2024 solo exhibition Maudlin Street at Steuben Gallery, you described your work as displacing “celebrity likenesses” to generate “new fictions,” a process you link to your media hoarding. Can you talk more about this?

J: This was something I used to do more in my work. In the past, I’ve taken celebrities’ likenesses and cast them in my paintings in original ways, kind of creating my own movies. It’s a way of using actors’ faces and my preconceived ideas of what a character played by a certain actor would be as a tool to craft my own narratives. 

I had been feeling bored after painting straight from film stills for a bit, and wanted to get back into crafting compositions and having that part of my process be more purposeful. I guess in a sense I’m reclaiming agency over these characters, but I feel more like I just began using the actors as characters in my paintings instead of purely being the subject matter at face value (i.e. Lena Dunham as a Prison Warden, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Morrissey).
 


Philip Seymour Hoffman as Morrissey, 2024
10”x8”
Oil Pastel on Paper

I: You have spoken about the ways the public projects “ideals” onto the movie or public subjects you choose to portray, even though many of the figures you depict have actually been demonized or ridiculed by the media and/or the narratives surrounding them (take Selma in Dancer in the Dark, or Lena Dunham, again). What draws you to this archetype of subject matter? Do you allow yourself to also judge the figures you depict, or does media hoarding suspend judgment?

J: People in real life and in film who have been cast out from society (Bess in Breaking the Waves, Lydia Tár in Tár, Kanye West, Lena Dunham, etc.) are the most appealing to me because of the vulnerability their downfall endows them with, as I mentioned earlier. When it comes to real life celebrities, that fall from grace is captivating because of the morbid humanization they go through, but also because of the blunt cruelness of the tabloids in contrast to their intense personal struggle. For people like Lena Dunham, her pariahdom is to a far lesser extent than some of the other examples, but I’m more interested in her unashamedness and confidence in being herself in the wake of public scrutiny. 

In film, social exile is one of the most striking and emotional narratives there can be in a story, and the one which I’m most affected by. Watching a character’s descent into loneliness is extremely emotional, and I think it creates some of the most interesting and complex characters in movies. This is comparable to the descent into loneliness of real-life celebrities, while their isolation is far more severe, as it’s simultaneously being broadcast via the Internet. 

I definitely have opinions about the figures in my pieces, but I suppose after viewing and scrolling through lots of images of a person and having so many saved in my folder I do become a bit desensitized to the initial connotations someone might perceive. Still, I think that in most of my artwork my feelings about the subject are the driving emotional force of the work, like in my Lena Dunham painting. 



All Is Full of Love (Lena Dunham Hugging Herself), 2024
36”x42”
Oil on Canvas

Molter’s practice invites us to reconsider how we consume media input, and the ways in which these habits foreclose intimacy, paused looking, and tactility. His art stands in the crux of tabloid culture, highbrow cinema, and material connoisseurship, and from Basta, we can’t wait to see how his practice further develops into its own.



The Last of The Famous International Playboys, 2025
21”x25”
Oil on Panel

Take a look at Jake Molter’s work in his new group exhibition Feet Pics. Learn more about him on his website and Instagram, @jakemolter_.