"The smartphone, it would seem, is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways for its capacity to provide a tool for resistance, on the one hand, but also the redundant behavioral patterns of social conformity, on the other. If, for Benjamin, the fundamental event of nineteenth-century modernity was the reproduction of images made possible through photography, then the newfound digital means of production—and the widespread availability of this means through the smartphone digital camera—ushers the present into an accelerated moment in which vastly all of mobile phone users are image producers, ad infinitum. Not to mention, ad nauseam. We are all, as Lom- bardía suggests, hyper-producers and hyper-consumers of images endowed with the transformative power to create our own modern myths.

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And we are all, albeit divinely flawed in the likeness of the Greek gods of antiquity, endowed with a formidable, transformative prosthetic called Android or iPhone. Toward what ends are these powerful new tools being used? In what ways have the uses of these technological prosthetics collapsed into routine, both to the benefit and detriment of users?

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​Displayed for viewers in Lombardía’s installation is the marble statue of an arm that cradles a touchscreen phone, a limb that proves suggestive of the missing members of the statues figured in other photographs incorporated into this project, like the goddesses Nike and Eros, Victory and Venus. The chosen title underscores the tactile action of pinching, swiping, tapping and scrolling, or the body’s interaction with the technological apparatus that is, viewers are reminded, as much a digital as a material interface. Amid the media saturation of images stored and circulated online, Lombardía carefully chooses to limit the number of artworks displayed in this installation thereby providing a minimalist reflection that brushes against the grain of digital excess, speed, and volume. Viewers are reminded that the selective scarcity of the chosen artworks assembled here invites us to think critically about the multiple, contradictory relationships across and among the images in this mosaic."

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Jonathan Snyder

Neo Gods & Hyper Myths

Meteoro Books, 2020