Iman Taha

Feature by Nathan Cho

Photos by Arden Sklar

Iman (she/her) is a senior at Barnard College in the class of ‘26. Her fervor for photography began at a young age and has blossomed into a diverse collection of photos that experiment with color, lighting, composition, and subject. This experimentation often comes with the spontaneity of Iman’s preferred photography style: street photography.

In preparation for my conversation with Iman, I wanted to get a feeling for how an artist like her would treat the walk from Mudd to Dodge. From my review of her work, Iman seemed to primarily practice street photography, a practice that waits for the perfect shot rather than creates it in detail. As I walked in front of Avery and across Low Steps, I tried as hard as I could to find at least one image worth taking. I came up incredibly short. Nothing seemed to come together, no matter how hard I tried. Thus, I entered my conversation with Iman with a looming question on my mind: How the hell do you do this?

Iman, a senior at Barnard College, had an unconventional start to her photography career. As a child, her medium of choice was not photography, but fashion design. She laughed about those days, explaining how her teacher told her that her designs “were never that good”—but her photography was. In the process of photographing her fashion designs, Iman found her inspiration for another medium. It was not only the best part of her fashion work, but the part where she had the most fun. So, slowly yet surely, Iman began to focus on photography as her main artistic medium. Today, she has an instagram account (@imansphotographs) burgeoning with photos from Turkey to New York City. As her portfolio has grown, so has her practice. While she still uses her father’s old film camera, she has expanded to digital photography as well. As her work has grown, I wondered how the years honed her craft. Concerning my original brewing question, Iman gave me a tour of her artistic mind and process as she patrols the streets.

Iman describes her draw towards street photography as a desire to discover more about herself. Through a documentation of the world as it is, she carves out a place for herself in it. The scenes she captures through her photography,—scenes she describes as distinctly “without her intervention”—provide a space for reflective meditation on her own place in the world. Although she is devoid from the photographs themselves, she is the one shaping them and the ultimate judge of its worth to her film. This meditative practice continues in the development of these photos. As a film photographer, Iman loves both the process of capturing a scene and the labor of processing it and bringing it to life. As she develops these photos, she sees herself developing a story. What draws her to the specific scenes she photographs is a feeling that there is a story hiding in the movement and organic composition of the world. The photograph, as much as it informs Iman, becomes a way to capture her own perspective and the own story she’s seeing. She describes her favorite photos as the ones with the most potential for that “story.” Whether it’s a little girl peering through a window or the soft touch of hands over a bin of vinyls, Iman hopes to capture and preserve the stories of her streets as a way to define her and her world.

Most of the people in Iman’s photos are strangers to her, yet she still develops a relationship with them through her lens. When asked about her approach to street photography and the art of capturing someone, she noted that there is a specific approach she sees in photographing strangers versus someone she’s familiar with. This difference in context foregrounds the photographic relationship Iman has with her subjects on the street. She observes that in her practice, the people blend into the environment, almost like a building. The human form becomes an object of beauty considered for its individual aesthetic qualities in relation to space. This environment, Iman shared, is the key to the beauty she finds in street photography. The confluence of all the aspects of the environment is not something that can be made, only encountered. It only exists out there. It’s just a matter of finding it. The hunt for the perfect street shot becomes one for treasure where gold is dug up and Iman lies in wait for the sun to hit and make the whole scene shimmer. Iman beautifully mused, “Everything you need is on the street.” 

To Iman, her street photography is like jazz. Despite its spontaneity and improvisation, like jazz, there is a rule in the noise. The unpredictability of light, shadow, composition, environment, and people all combine in a band of noise that Iman tunes to perfection. Iman notices this intricate balance of having a controlled eye and an open mind that truly makes her photos distinct. 

One of the instruments in Iman’s symphony is color. When I first saw Iman’s photographs, my mind was instantly drawn to her use of color. Her photos swam in tones of sepia, black, white, blue. Some of her photos were practically dripping with saturation while others were quiet in their display. In Iman’s black and white photos, she specifically gives attention to contrast. She seeks out the shadows and lights that bring a scene to life. By desaturating the photo, this stark contrast is brought to life. In her photos of color, Iman loves to play with distortion. Whether its light bouncing between ripples of water or glaring off of window panes, Iman understands light and its effect on color as vitally important to the life of a scene. The color and the light can obscure or highlight; focus or distract; liven or dull. Despite this love for color, Iman has shied away from editing her photos. She speaks to how the editing process takes something away from her photos rather than adding it. She just wants to “capture what I capture.” So, Iman’s alterations come before the photo is taken, in the various camera settings that change the wash of the photo. Iman uses daylight and night settings to elevate her photos, enhancing them without necessarily changing them. Iman values color (values) in how they exist and how they can be created, and she turns those dials accordingly.

As someone who splits the year’s time in New York City and Turkey, I wanted to probe the matter of location for Iman. Do opposite sides of the world warrant different practices? While Iman’s general approach stays the same, she identifies some key differences in her practice in Turkey versus in the US versus in the places she travels to. Between Turkey and the US, the energy and tone of her photographs are incredibly different. In Turkey, Iman finds her eyes drawn to architecture while her eyes are more drawn to the people in the US. Despite these differences, both places have a “home-y” feeling for her and this familiarity contrasts with the feeling of her photography from places she’s visited or vacationed in. Iman stated that this feeling of the “outside eye” in these places affects the perspective of her photographs. The difference is clear.

Iman currently maintains photography as an artistic hobby, though she practices it more formally as a photographer for Columbia’s Daily Spectator. The Spectator gave her the unique and fulfilling opportunity to join a community of student photographers. Whether it’s from simple help cleaning a camera or sharing knowledge and approaches, Iman’s involvement in The Daily Spectator has provided her a new avenue to explore her art.

Iman hopes to be able to start a professional practice with her photography, but she knows that, no matter what, photography will always be in her life. She’s currently trying to expand her practice and experimenting with different approaches to her work. She’s particularly interested in exploring narrative photography—bringing new meaning to her curation and compilation of images. You can follow this journey with her on her instagram @imansphotographs.

Iman’s handle of the camera is like no other. Through her lens, she captures those fleeting moments whose significance, intimacy, and emotion only becomes legible on a second meditation. Iman’s art shows us that in the hustle and bustle of NYC where all anyone is thinking about is where to go next—everything we need is in the streets. All you need to do is look.

Julia Kirby

Feature by Eli Schalet

Photos by Moksha Akil

(Pairs well with “Wild Mountain Honey” by Steve Miller Band, your favorite goat’s milk gouda and crackers [or some casu martzu if you find yourself reading this in Sardinia], and a glass of chocolate milk.)

Julia is a visual artist from San Fransisco in the class of 2027 at Columbia College also studying physics and archeology. She is a painter (oil, acrylic, watercolor), tattoo artist, illustrator, welder, leatherworker, jewelry maker, glassworker, photographer, and bacterial bio-artist at Columbia Biomedical Engineering. Speaking with her on the steps of St. John’s Cathedral, it's almost as if she can’t not create. “You give me a material, and I'll give you art. I guess for me, art is just anything that I work with my hands.” Her art experiments with how we create memories, their preservation, their distortion; she wants to create these memories synthetically.

As the Thursday evening sun leaves us on a blue-gray and cold Amsterdam Ave, Julia tells me about her bio-art in between Mount Sinai sirens, a hand in her bleached hair. Working out of the Danino Lab – a studio part of Columbia’s Synthetic Biological Systems Lab – Kirby uses microbiology techniques that are usually found in scientific research to make art. “Instead of using bacteria to make a drug that cures cancer, you're making bacteria look pretty. Way better (she laughs sarcastically).” After extracting strains of bacteria with a solution from samples usually sourced from natural environments, like for her ongoing project focalizing national parks, she’ll pipette that solution onto an agar plate that helps the bacteria grow. She then incubates these, sometimes just overnight, other times for up to two weeks, and returns them to colonies of bacteria of all different shapes and colors. Once the bacteria has covered the agar plate she scans it and lets the plate dry out, sometimes adding chemical stains or food dye to augment the plate’s coloring. Other times though, like some of her recent work with bright orange and yellow bacterial samples from musical instruments, she’ll leave the plates with their natural color.

This process is highly selective, and she often goes through many iterations of plates experimenting with different strains or agar mediums, or changing the nutrient mediums or broths. When she inoculates a plate with bacteria, it’s in this malleable liquid culture that she can manipulate and create shapes with. “Recently, I made a plate with a smiley face.” With all this experimentation, Kirby says she sees herself more as a scientist in the lab than an artist. The beauty jumps out from the natural patterns, then she recreates them.

Julia’s scientific creativity stems from her Northern California roots. Up until middle school, she focused her energy mostly on the fine arts, yet was also inspired by the nature around her and captivated by at-home chemistry kits; the tension between science and art in her life was always present, but it wasn’t until she discovered a warehouse in Oakland that housed an industrial arts studio that the two collided. Going every summer with her friends, she immersed herself in the more mechanical processes of artistic creation. “Up until then, it was mostly drawing and painting, and I was still doing that, but I think this warehouse made me realize ‘Wow, there's so much science that can be applied to art, and art that can be applied to science.’” It is now that we must issue a sizable ‘thank you’ to her high school biology teacher Christine Bois, who introduced the young artist to the field of bio-art through a lab one day in class. “[We had] all these colorful bacteria, and like, ‘You can make a flower with bacteria’. And I [thought] ‘This is so novel”, at the time I was like, this is really cool. It was a cute, fun science experiment. I need to go tell her that I'm working [in bio-art] because she's literally gonna pass out.”

Often when creating her plates, Kirby tries to pick bacteria that are particularly motile, meaning their growth moves around the plate significantly. “My favorite species that I've found is called bacillus piscis” (she identifies the strain through sequencing) “and it grows very beautifully in this spider-like formation on MRS. I found it because I collected dirt from Grand Teton. I went to Jenny Lake and got this strain of bacteria, and it's beautiful. And it was sequenced from, [the muscle of] this Antarctic fish!”

When Julia is satisfied with a plate she’ll cast it in PDMS (a translucent silicone preservative). But regardless of the outcome, she keeps all of the plates. Those that she doesn’t cast eventually dry out. “It's just kind of wrinkly, and it's not beautiful, but it's also not ugly. The plate is always aging. If you look at the work of previous plates that were made years ago they're still changing shape, even now.” 

This transformation of the physical form, or distortion of image, is present almost everywhere in Kirby’s artwork, but especially in her tattooing. “Recently, a lot of the tattoos that I'm doing are copies of this childhood illustration. I did a tattoo on my mom that was an illustration my brother had made when he was little. I tattooed like a star on myself. It's very much in this childlike, kind of fat lines, distorted shapes. There's a beauty in the imperfections.” Particularly with her tattoo for her mother, she felt a strong meaning in the fusion of mother, daughter, and son through an atemporal artwork on an aging body, almost a connection to her mother’s past self via maternity. It was her mother who also taught her how to watercolor in elementary school, setting the foundation for Julia’s artistic journey, or rather, explosion. In this sense, it’s come full circle in the form of permanent ink.

This comparison between the agent of agar and tattooing is also a strong parallel for how Julia thinks about memory, a core tenet of her artistry. Her eyes light up when she remembers a quote from the introduction of photographer and activist Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency: 

“Memory allows an endless flow of connections. Stories can be rewritten, memory can’t. If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the experience of memory, a story without end. I want to be able to experience fully, without restraint. People who are obsessed with remembering their experiences usually impose strict self-disciplines. I want to be uncontrolled and controlled at the same time. The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.”

“She's kind of putting into words how I think about memory, and how I think about my art. Because I feel like my memory is not great, and I often distort memories of people, places and things. I think my art is me searching for the preservation of the past. That's why I deal with so much scrapbooking. It's why I obsessively keep the train tickets and the receipts whenever I travel.”

This thread is what Kirby uses to weave her infinite spiderweb of mediums and disciplines, connecting the academic with the artistic and everything in between, hoping to catch as much authentic experience in her ‘synthetic memory’ as possible. But she doesn’t always stick to staunch realism; often, authentic replication of the subjective mind’s warping of past events is just as necessary. I mentioned to Julia how I find this distortion in her paintings especially, and she agreed. “80% of the paintings that I make are based off of this [image] in my mind. So when I'm painting something, I'm not observing this physical landscape. I'm imagining this landscape in my mind and painting from that memory,” a memory beautifully warped and twisted by subjectivity.

Julia cites Max Beckmann (showing me The Night and Family Picture, bodies twisting in hyperbolized personality) and Edward Hopper (the famous Nighthawks, Gas, his lighthouses) as her main inspirations, especially with how they distort space. “With Max Beckmann, it's a very clear distortion of space where I'm like, ‘Wow, this is so interesting, how you've made me feel very uncomfortable with these people, but also, like, intrigued.’ It's wonderful. And then with Edward Hopper, the way that he [paints] solitude and the emptiness of this space. Every single time he paints it has this sense of nostalgia.” 

This distortion manifests materially in her leatherwork and jewelry. Julia often takes discarded materials and turns them into wearable art, usually gifting them to friends for birthday gifts. “I'm like, ‘If you don't take this, you hate me.’ even though what I'm giving you is literally trash, but I made it into art.” This fascination with trash came from an archive photography class she took freshman year, investigating how we remember photos (which are often as dishonest as they are honest), how we preserve an archive, and what a selective archive is. Kirby saw trash as a clear archive of our environment, accentuating the contrast between today's trash and the trash of the same communities some 200 years ago, culminating in a photo book on the subject.

We laugh about the elusive and confusing nature of nostalgia, and its similarly manipulative effects. “I look back at the bags that I made in middle school, and I'm like, bro, you were so weird. That's also how we're looking back at fashion cycles, like how we're remembering indie sleaze. The indie sleaze that is making a comeback now is so different from what it actually was. I think that's also a part of where I struggle with my art, because I want to capture everything, but I can't. And so how do we select what's important and what's not, and what's worth telling or communicating? I can't preserve every memory. I can't keep this conversation we're having right now. But will I keep this bowl?” (she gestures to her new empty poke bowl) “Maybe, but how? This is why I'm into archeology, this interpretation of what remains, or this interpretation of a culture or a society based on what remains and the physical manifestation of that.” 

Julia Kirby posts all her art on her Instagram account @juliamakesartz, where she also takes commissions and tattoo bookings through DMs. Julia’s ongoing musical instrument project with the Danino Lab will experiment with programming code that can combine bio-art with music generated from bacterial patterns. The Lab will also be exhibiting her bio-art along with others at the Mosesian Center for the Arts in Watertown, Massachusetts from November 15 - January 03, 2025. And don’t be shy to ask her about it in person as well. “I'll be around campus selling my art!”

Amber Li

Feature by Vivian Wang

Photos by Chantel Hope

Originally from Dallas, Texas, Amber Li is currently a sophomore at Columbia University, majoring in computer science and minoring in statistics. She draws inspiration from her studies in the STEM field and her passion for ballet to create across various mediums, from traditional oil painting to technological art, and even fashion design. Much like herself, her work carries a whimsical, graceful, and innovative spirit.

October 4, 2024. 10:00 AM EST. 60°F. A sunny fall Friday morning.

I perched on a bench outside Dodge, anxiously waiting for Amber. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in the wrong place—why did we decide to meet outside the gym? My instincts proved right, as that morning I discovered that both Dodge Physical Fitness Center and Dodge Hall exist. I scrambled to get to our actual rendezvous, feeling silly for my mix-up and even more anxious about making a bad first impression. Luckily, when I found her outside Dodge Hall, she greeted me with a warm, bubbly smile. Wearing a cozy sweater, flowing white skirt, and brown leather boots, Amber looked like she stepped out right out of a storybook. The breeze danced through her wispy bangs, framing her blushed face, and I felt a strange familiarity with her. Both being second-generation immigrants with Chinese parents, we bonded over our shared experiences: the push towards STEM, the weight of the “American dream,” piano, and then quitting piano…

Amber was drawn to the allure of New York City and its seemingly boundless opportunities, yearning to break free from the comfortable bubble of her hometown and the—unfortunately much too often—linear path of STEM careers. 

“The diversity of New York, and what it claims [to be], and the art space has always attracted me. I wanted to immerse myself in a place where I feel like I could truly be myself. Although I love home, I feel like I conformed rather than was myself.”

Amber has been immersed in the field of arts her entire life—visual and performing. At Columbia, she’s the assistant artistic director for Columbia Ballet Collaborative, where she manages the behind-the-scenes operations while performing. Her love for dance is evident in many of her works. 

“One thing that really drives my artistic investigation is my background in ballet. As a dancer, you really have to see the body as a vessel of movement, expressing emotion. I’m so entranced by the human body. It’s capable of so many things, and I’ve realized it’s a trend in my art, not purposefully. I have a lot of pieces that investigate bodily movement, and if not the body, movement and dynamism.”

Silhouetted, 2022

Maneuver, 2021

The painting that drew me to her, Silhouette (2022), depicts a minimalistic outline of a figure folded over; the detail in the painting is found in the hands and feet, which grasp the body in a sensual, intimate manner. It's both one of her and my favorites. When I asked her about the story behind this painting, she opened up to me about her struggle with body image as a result of dance. Taking a sip from her Joe’s matcha, she explained, “I can’t lie to you, I think dancing has instilled in me this almost too keen awareness of my body. I struggled a lot with body image, almost all my life, until college; I feel like it's so much freer here”. Silhouette (2022) alludes to this keen awareness of the body, capturing both a delicate fluidity and tender stillness. Her other works, such as Maneuver (2021), demonstrate a similar investigation of the body, its function, capabilities, and limits. 

公主?, 2021

Cupid and Psyche, 2024

Of the various mediums she explores, Amber tells me that she favors oil painting for its familiarity. She explains, “it's so flexible, and you're able to do so much. It’s very organic and closely aligns with humanism. You're able to portray real life in the way that we see it, more accurately than other mediums.” Looking through her portfolio, I found that most of her works combine traditional elements with a whimsicality. In one of her most recent oil paintings, Cupid and Psyche (2024), she took inspiration from one of her favorite artists, Colleen Barry. Amber said that she wanted to break free from a realist point of view by merging vibrant, funky colors into her depiction of an Italian sculpture she came across at the MET. Scrolling through her portfolio, I noticed that she has consistent fairytale references and themes in her work, and when I asked her about them, she seemed taken aback. Her art is intimate and oozes from her memory unconsciously. She told me, “I’m just a girl at heart…I think before even realizing that I tended towards fairy tales, maybe more than the next person, I had been already creating so many artworks about that. I think there’s a portrait of my sister in a Cinderella dress, and I didn’t realize that was something I was doing.” Her subconscious integration of fantasy is a comforting reminder that youth, whim, and wonder remain with us as we navigate the complexities of aging.

With a software engineer for a father and an accountant for a mother, Amber was gently herded toward studying mathematics growing up. “In high school, or actually for all my life, I found that finding time for art was the single biggest challenge I faced, because the interdisciplinary sector between math and art isn't that big. There's only so much you can do, and I found myself just living two lives,” she said. Surprisingly, computer science became the in-between. Similar to her artistic process, Amber loved how computer science requires intensive research, technicality, and creativity. 

“It really combines the creative portion I love about art and the super technical, problem-solving. I love to think about things from a quantitative approach, while also being creative. So for me, that was my balance. I was able to combine both my passions into one”

Yin and Yang

Ultraviolet, 2022

In some of her recent works, Amber explores a new medium by meshing technology with art, drawing inspiration from algorithms, while also experimenting with generative arts, like “DALL-E.” 

“Everything that I have been doing has been technology adjacent, but these two pieces, one of them was called Ultraviolet and the other is called Yin and Yang, are literally, computer generated art. And I think the inspiration behind that was: How can I use computer processes to still emulate the same emotions you get through oil painting? They're completely different mediums, but the creative process that I took was very similar.

Her digital pieces introduce the intricate nuances of computer science while retaining aspects of movement reminiscent of her oil paintings. Her works serve as a synergy between the analytical and the expressive, reflecting her deep understanding of both realms. Contrary to popular opinion, Amber views the emergence of AI-generated art as a new source of inspiration and possibility, rather than a creative hindrance to humanity. Initially apprehensive, she discovered once she began experimenting with it that it was just another medium.

“It truly is just another tool. If you know how to use it, it can inspire so much more about your own creative process. I used it to augment the boundaries of one of my pieces. It provokes you to think about your art in a different way that you otherwise couldn't. In completing those two projects, I realized that it’s coming from you, and you're recursively editing, revising, shaping, and completely reimagining your own code. In that sense, it really is just like an artistic process.”

Murmuration, 2022

Amber recently began venturing into fashion design, actualizing her digital creations to life in corporeal form. Made of tape, wire, and ink, Murmuration Garment Design (2022) was heavily inspired by her obsession with Iris van Herpen, who she discovered similarly tries to marry her background in ballet with math and engineering. 

As a STEM student at Columbia, Amber talked in depth about her challenges juggling her intended career path with her involvement in the arts. She reflected on her experiences, saying, “It's tough to balance timelines. You only have so many hours in the day, so perhaps college is the biggest creative block for me.” Having a similar dilemma myself, I asked her how she does it, and so successfully too. Her answer: “Art isn’t going to escape you.” She emphasized that creativity is an intrinsic part of who we are, and it doesn’t simply vanish when life gets hectic. Being an artist, she reminded me, doesn’t necessitate constant creation; instead, it's also important to savor the moments when you can engage and appreciate the creative expression of others. Her words of advice: take advantage of Columbia Arts Initiative.

When I asked about her future career plans, she told me she hopes to find herself in data science, AI, quantitative analysis, or even architecture. For now, art simply serves as a personal indulgence, but she toys with the idea of pursuing a masters in art, should life lead her that way. 

More of Amber’s work can be found on her website. 

Kathleen Halley-Segal

Feature by Eve Rosenblum

Photos by Kendall Bartel

Kathleen Halley-Segal CC’ 28 is majoring in Art History and Visual Arts. She paints mostly in acrylic and watercolor. Her work was featured at the Bronx Borough Art Festival, the Met, and the YoungArts Week Exhibition and focuses mostly on topics of gender norms, adolescence, and intergenerational connection.

Thanksgiving at my Grandma’s house was an elaborate affair: 20 cousins, 4 uncles, 3 aunts, and 2 or so turkeys. A hodgepodge of tables pushed together piled high with an assortment of dishes sustained the conversation from afternoon into the evening. Kathleen Halley-Segal observes that the labor required for events like this one tends to fall on women. For them, the time-staking preparations are not necessarily a choice. Rather, fulfilling gendered expectations requires it of them.

Both the hardship and the strength granted by this subjection are main themes in Kathleen’s art work. Her grandmothers and mother feature often. The settings are quotidian. One painting shows Kathleen’s mother breastfeeding. A suburban family home stands out in a melange of pink, blue, and green. Her mother’s lips are parted as though mid speech. In one hand, she supports her daughter. The other is placed casually behind her.

There’s a radical quality to this painting. In contemporary society, images of breastfeeding remain taboo. At the same time, women with children are frequently isolated from the identity of caretaker. Kathleen’s portrait both embodies this experience, and disrupts it. The woman in the painting is visibly interested in things besides the child. She challenges traditional depictions of mother and child.

A Mother Feeds Her Child

The women in Kathleen’s life also produced her interest in art. In my conversation with her, she described visiting her paternal grandmother’s home.

“She loved art. She’d compiled clippings over the course of her life that we would look through together.”

Her grandmother inspired the younger Kathleen as she puts it, “to capture the intricacies of the small details in the world.”

She Looks Forward, a painting of her Grandmother, seems to do just that. Every fold is visible in her sweater. Her hair is silver, but also black, and gray. She gazes away from the viewer, in reflection. She is both the older version of herself and all the years before. They all exist at once.

She Looks Forward

In high school Kathleen began a formal training at the Arts Student League on 59th Street. Classes helped to develop her technical abilities and other students offered a cohort of artistic peers. 

Many of those peers are in art school now. Kathleen chose to study Art History at Columbia. She didn’t think studying art full time would be a good fit. 

“I think that would not only be limiting in my life, but also limiting in my own artistic practice,” she says. “I think making art, or doing anything creative is about constantly getting inspiration from many different sources.”

One source of inspiration has been the City itself. Growing up in New York, Kathleen was tasked with navigating the subway from an early age. She noticed a sweetness and a holiness of people through these experiences, qualities not often noted in descriptions of New Yorkers. In her painting Sleeping on the D Train, a pair of teenage girls, heading to or from school, rest on each other. The window of the subway car is blue, as though looking out over the ocean or the sky. 

Sleeping On the D Train

Her scenes of the city are reminiscent of artists Jordan Casteel and Alice Neel. Kathleen says they provided an outline for what representation of New York could look like to the young artist. Neel was particularly known for her subversion of the male gaze, painting women conscious of their objectification. The two artists famously explored identity, sexuality, and subjectivity.

Kathleen has a style of her own. Behind many of her quotidian subjects are loud backgrounds. There are stars and wispy strands that make the wind appear to come alive. Many of the paintings use neon blues and pinks. She describes herself as “loose with her colors” and “very experimental.” I ask Kathleen what inspires her more dramatic choices.

“There’s an energy and youthfulness and creativity to the women in my life,” Kathleen says. “That's the way I see them, but that isn't really translated into their physical being.”

As her grandmother aged, photography captured less and less the person that she was. Kathleen remembers the way she talked to people and the little objects around her home. Scattered, like a huge gallery piece, they are embedded in her grandmother’s personhood.

In one painting, a pastiche of fiery colors frame the older woman. She seems to breathe in, breathing out oranges and reds. I tell Kathleen I feel as though I’ve met her.

Living Memory

I see my grandmother too. Louise was a mother to eight and the image of a dotting wife. She was also a social worker for over 30 years.

For Kathleen, the physical and emotional labor women are forced to take on is unfair, but it’s also a source of liberation.

“The expectation that women do a lot of the cooking and preparing everything is a role that's constricting. But it's also this position of authority that women have.” Kathleen says.

As she reflects on the women in her family gathering in her kitchen over the High Holidays and Christmas, both important in her interfaith family, Kathleen is reminded of this physical and emotional labor. She notes how within her family they represent both a sort of injustice and simultaneously a meaningful role.

“It's so much work to plan these events and these dinners, but it's also like this really creative task. You're putting together this huge meal. Those two things exist at the same time.”

The possibility of both power and subjugation exist at once. It is exemplary of the complexity visible in all her art work.

The Grandmothers

Maya Shkolnik

Feature by Kate Henry

Photos by Iris Pope

Maya (she/her) is a senior at Columbia College studying Russian Literature (CC ’25). She works in both digital and film to showcase not only her technical skills but also her deep emotional intelligence and connection to her subjects. Her ability to capture the “little details” of someone's character through her photography gives her photos depth and an atmospheric quality. She is curious and excited to keep pushing the boundaries of her photography, always eager to learn more and capture more of her world. 

Maya and I agreed to meet at her apartment near campus, and as I walked through the hallway to her door I was anxious to see what would come of the conversation. After conducting some light reconnaissance of her portfolio before the interview, I got the sense that Maya’s view of the world is bold and electrifying. Often working in black and white to amplify the contrast in her images, her style captures animated and thought-provoking moments. I was unsure of the best way to approach asking about a style like hers.

Yet Maya welcomed me in, and as I set up my things, she and her roommate finished cooking their fried eggs for breakfast. Seeing them as they live informally and without preparation was inviting. 

A row of various black boots lined the wall, housed under a rack of eclectic jackets. Funky chairs and a coffee table with magazines and newspapers filled the living room, and my eye was immediately drawn to a large sparkly Gustav Klimt painting hanging on the wall that Maya later told me was from HomeGoods. Wine bottles with dainty flowers inside and printed photographs of household items (I think one of them was of the inside of a dishwasher) muddled my preconceived notions of Maya from her work and immediately ignited my curiosity about who she is.

I began by asking her about the beginning of her interest in photography. She replied with a smile that she first started getting into photography when she was very young, about 7, and she and her best friend would pose for the camera and make content about “how to be a fashion model” and what to wear. Perhaps this fueled Maya’s interest in fashion photography because she has since worked as a photography assistant for a Vogue Portugal shoot and has had her work featured in Interview Magazine among other well-known publications. She is also the Editor-at-large for Hoot Magazine, Columbia/Barnard’s fashion magazine. 

“I had a lot of really good photography influences in my life, just felt like a natural progression…One of my friends asked me to do a photography job; would take photos for weekly gatherings hosted by the New York chapter of the UN. On my way to that I would take pictures of my friends, and felt this was bringing me so much joy. I just went from there.”

Many of Maya’s photographs capture her friends, and I asked her how she goes about shooting people she knows. She responded that she lets her relationship with her subjects dictate the direction of the shoot. This casual format and spontaneity of the shoots allow the nature of Maya’s relationships to show through. She clearly sees beyond what the camera lens shows. She is able to capture emotions that perhaps people don’t even know they’re expressing, like the subtle nuances of their expressions, quick glances and movements, or even just capturing the emotion behind someone's eyes.

“I'm naturally very good at psychoanalysis, so I want to continue that theme in my work… I'm obsessed with people's, like, tiny details”

When Maya revealed her skills for reading people, I, too, felt analyzed. There were many times throughout the interview that I had to redirect the line of questioning back to her because we would fall into easy conversation and she would begin asking me questions about myself. This speaks to a natural inquisitiveness and interest in uncovering the parts of people below the surface. I immediately thought of one of the first photographs I saw in her portfolio from an Alice in Wonderland-inspired shoot. The model stares directly at the camera, with an ornate, sculptural headdress, and tears streaming down her face. Maya captured the model’s mood so vividly, and even though it’s not a wild facial expression, something in her eyes tells viewers more.

She also works in self-portraiture. “When I am choosing myself [as the subject]” she explained “it's to make a point. It's to say something, to reflect on how I'm feeling. There's the first self-portrait stuff that I really did when I was first starting to get a grasp on what photography really was. That was really powerful, to be in the studio by myself and just pose in front of the camera” 

The self-portraiture she engages in seems to serve as a form of introspection, allowing her to explore her feelings and identity. This power is evident in her self-portraiture, which she seldom seems to do. It’s clear that this practice holds significant weight for her, and it adds another layer to her understanding of photography as a medium for both personal expression and capturing the world through her eyes.

Her current project is with darkroom photography, a new medium for her. As a senior herself, she has been capturing her subjects in graduation caps and gowns in various scenes. Her concept aims to highlight the instability of graduation in a society that is increasingly unstable itself. By photographing graduates in unorthodox and imaginative ways, she wants to convey the uncertainty of post-graduate life and the future of the world. 

“People didn't really post-grad photos last semester unless you didn't care at all about what was going on. And the ones that were posted were super shiny and really contrasted everything else that was being posted online. So I thought, well, I think that a lot of my friends could not see themselves smiling in front of Columbia in the same pose.” 

Thus, the idea to make quasi-grad photos was born. Some images show her friend, dressed in a Columbia-blue gown eating in John Jay, while another shows a graduate in a bathtub. Darkroom is an unfamiliar process for Maya, but she’s excited to work with a photography medium that produces a physical object. There’s a chemistry and materiality to the process that brings a different element to the final photographs. 

Maya spoke about the community of artists she is surrounded by at Columbia and in New York in general. She mentioned the underground Russian Queer community (which is perhaps a little less underground now, sorry) and the way she, perhaps subconsciously, represents elements of this community in her work. She spoke about the nonconformist art they create “about extremism, internet culture and smoking weed, and weed addiction and schizophrenia.”

This artist community who inspires and creates alongside Maya was the focus of her exhibition in the very apartment we were in. She hosted an exhibition titled Immediate Art, in which 20 of her friends displayed their work in the empty apartment before Maya and her roommates moved in. Some of the artwork still hung as we spoke, and Maya smiled as she said, ‘I'm just gonna keep your work. Yeah, if you don't want it back, you don't ask for it back, and then I’ll just keep it.”.

Maya sees herself putting on more exhibitions and displaying more of her work too. She will continue to take Photography classes at Columbia, but she sees herself going back to school for Russian Literature as well. Perhaps her experience with fashion photography will open doors, but for right now “[She’s] more interested in reflecting on what's going on around me, and kind of picking up pieces here and there.”

Riley Tavares

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Will Park

Riley interlaces different mediums that give her the opportunity to explore her emotional depth and sensibility through thoughtful art and skillful craft. Riley prioritizes the physical experience of making art, which is reflected in her tendencies to make physical objects she can give out and wear down with use. She seems to excel in all mediums she explores with, consistently building a physical vocabulary for her expressionary needs. During our conversation, I picked up on her innate need for creating, her variety of inspirations, and the nostalgic sense of beauty comfort she expresses through her art. 

“Please don’t quote me in a way that will make me sound silly” was one of the last things Riley Tavares said to me before leaving her dorm, and while laughing I thought that would be a difficult thing to do. Riley is a Senior at Columbia majoring in Archeology, on the cusp of graduating and pursuing her summer plans of excavating archaeological sites in Peru and Italy, then going into art conservation- a “problem- solvey” career plan that incorporates all of Riley’s loves and passions. During our conversation in her dorm- a second-floor suite room cozily decorated with some of her and her friends’ art, truly exhibiting the comfort and warmth of an artist and crafter- I got to see peaks of these said loves and passions, which I have taken the freedom to condense into themes of beauty, vulnerability, playfulness, and sentimentality. 

We began exploring her artistic sensibilities by talking about Ratrock, and her deep love for this magazine. As its current co-president. Riley joined the magazine as a freshman during Covid, along with her (first!) friend and co-president Jaqueline. They have seen the magazine be reborn after the virtual dry spell of Zoom meetings, grow in number and in variety of artistic expression, and its increasing welcomeness towards various artistic mediums. She told me about her vision of Ratrock becoming a more prominent community on campus, and how she thinks that fostering the possibility for its participants to develop their individual art is key. She also told me about the effects Ratrock has had on her. It has oscillated her self-perception as an artist, sometimes feeling like her creative energy goes primarily to the club. Seeing her campus reality be so full of art, a beautiful slip one might fall into at Columbia, Riley mentioned how she felt like she is more unserious as an artist. I think she is. I can easily imagine both a younger and older Riley exploring with every medium available to her, experiencing colors, movement, and feelings while making art, all in an attempt to be free from imposed structures and rules, and to blur the lines between the body and the emotion, something that requires allowing unseriousness to creep in. It is this unseriousness that, in my eyes, makes her an authentic artist. Looking around her room and spotting her pieces on the walls, on her bed, her nightside table, her floor, I understood that she appreciates exploration and creation, meaning she has to diverge in mediums to bodily and emotionally experience creation in all its diversity and difference. 

Riley is an artist in many and all senses, even though she might doubt defining herself as one. She has a need of bringing her emotions into a tangible reality through art and craft. When it comes to the division of those, Riley has two conflicting approaches. She knows, theoretically, that there is a difference between art and craft -“art with a capital A”- and that much of what she has begun doing falls into craft. But her experiences in crafting- punch needling, sewing, quilting- fulfill her expressionary needs of showing love, bringing physicality to her emotions, soft, tactile experiences, and altering space by creating it, all seem to point to what an artist does. On the other hand, there is a more humane approach to art that Riley has, it integrates the physical space where she makes art with interaction between her and people who she values, and I remember thinking that Riley’s art is about exactly that. More than a desire for representation, Riley has a desire for remembering, being remembered, and finding emotional closures and apertures to people who she appreciates and experiences she goes through. She thinks about the details of experiencing art. She buys baby fabric for her pillows since she appreciated the warmth and softness it provides, she gives her pillows away, wanting them to be worn down by constant love and use, she thinks about grass and being barefoot, about the body and the experience of life through her process of art making in a way that centers both the artist and the receiver-Riley’s art is valuable both as a process and as a product. She showed me some of her pillows. They have the coziest used feeling to them; such personal, intimate gifts she gives. 

Riley’s artistic inspirations also come from feelings of homesickness and her relationship with her mom. She made a quilt that is all about the nostalgia that growing up inadvertently comes with, representing the ways in which she appreciates home, the guilt she feels from being away from it. “My cyanotype quilt is about the guilt of becoming my own person, missing my mom. I think my relationship with her is always a huge inspiration. Also my appreciation for Pennsylvania,  for grass and being barefoot.”  

When it comes to painting, she hasn’t in a while. In high school, Riley only painted with acrylics, so coming into college meant that she had the opportunity to relearn what she thought she knew about painting. 

“First it (oil painting) made me think I forgot how to paint. It works differently from acrylic, since they dry so quickly. Oil is malleable for so long, and I felt my work would get muddy. I struggled with mixing my own colors. That is something I love about painting- color. With acrylics, I feel like there is something so beautiful about- and I know other people really dog on this- but getting a fresh pre-mixed Acrylic color you want, squeezing it out of the tube, and using that pure. Oh, it feels so good. With oil, I had to learn how to mix and get the hang of the malleable textures, which I now love. So it was really fun, all the problem solving- infuriating, but fun.”

Riley showed me an oil painting called Belly, an aggregate of poses of her own stomach, surrounded by the brightest greens and blues. She told me that she made that as a way of liberating herself from self criticism and from a constant sense of judgment regarding both chronic illness and bodily, physical perceptions. Again, the theme of bodily engagement and representation arose in our conversation, and Riley mentioned how she enjoyed the experience of painting and the feeling of a finished project. 

“When I'm painting, it doesn't really matter what the fuck I'm painting. I'm simply enjoying putting color on canvas. Figuring out how to get the visual effects you want- I specifically like painting skin because it requires a huge experimentation with color”

If she makes a painting, she likes to keep it, see it in her room or in her house. But when it comes to crafting, Riley prefers to give those away, to physically set her presence in space. In making art, Riley is making the most of the experience of living, she is concentrated on life while making tangible proofs of it. 

The last medium Riley and I talked about was sculpture, specifically the two ceramic kettlebells that were working as door stoppers in her room. She made them in a ceramics class, having recently finished chemotherapy for cancer. The weights read 30 and 5 pounds, but in reality, the 5 pound one is heavier than the 30 pound one. These gray sculptures seemed to be outside her usual, colorful style, which she was both coerced and inspired into making.

“I feel like ceramics ended up being a really good medium for me to use because I couldn’t have expressed what I was trying to through painting, except maybe in a really cringy, literal way. Versus this, it’s cool. Like people get to embody the feeling of not knowing your own strength or being surprised by sudden signs of weakness. My strength is shifting all the time, so I don't always know if picking something up will be surprisingly heavy for me now. You know, maybe last week it was and this week it isn’t. Yeah. So it's really fun to make them and mess with people. I wanted to make something that was more utilitarian, and people really liked it. I was so surprised. The things that I normally make are so different from this, so I  thought no one would care about these, but people really liked them, and so do I.”

With that, Riley told me more about her career plans, being so close to leaving Columbia. She is ready to come into a new moment to explore and dive into art conservation, which we bonded by fangirling over a professor we have both taken- Lisa Trever!-a perfect coincidence for the end of our conversation. Riley will join her in Peru for excavations this summer, and then probably come back to New York to take some classes and get ahead in the requirements she still needs to do for art conservation. She seems to be excited about leaving a place she admittedly is very attached to, and while she will miss her room, her friends, and Columbia, she has so much to look forward to.

Claire Kim

Feature by Nathan Ko

Photos by Anaïs Mitelberg

Claire Kim is a junior at Columbia College majoring in Computer Science. A Korean-American multidisciplinary artist, Claire fancies creative direction, styling and makeup, and production design. As diverse as her artistic interests are her inspirations (furniture, sculpture, and interior design), her academic interests (sociology, computer science, math), and mediums (film, music video, fashion show). I’m sure there are a couple more I’m missing. 

While waiting for Claire at Blue Bottle Coffee on Broadway, I suddenly worried. “Do I remember what she looked like?” While familiar with the faces of the models she’s worked with, I was less familiar with the face of the one behind the camera, behind the styling. 

This worry quickly dissipated. Coming in with black clothes—not a Hamlet, these are “the suits of woe” black but a rather sophisticated, inviting black. Claire recognized me and came over to my temporary corner in Blue Bottle. She had a hot matcha latte with such latte art on top that could excuse the Blue Bottle price tag. Her enthusiastic smile made it easy to converse with someone of her magnitude—not just an artist, but an artist in many different areas. In a sense, a jack of all trades and yet a master of all. 

However, to describe herself, Claire often used the word “amateur.” She considers herself an amateur because art was a relatively new hobby that came out of a crisis during her sophomore year. 

This crisis was a crisis of what to pursue. With the sophomore year CC major declaration deadline looming, she, at the time, was debating between computer science, sociology, and her other interests. But, in a way, this wasn’t a crisis but rather a metamorphosis into becoming the artist she is today.

While thinking about her interests, she realized that she needed new hobbies. “Frankly, I didn’t have any hobbies, so I decided that this year I needed to do something creative.”

With this new art bug inside her, what allowed her to create art for the first time since seventh grade was a Literature Humanities assignment. “I was inspired by Dante, and I wanted to use fashion and makeup to convey symbolism that I was interested in.”

While the project looks polished, Claire opened up about the messy process of creating art for the first time in a while. Claire had to find an empty classroom instead of a proper studio, stood on a table to get a blank wall, and didn’t edit the final results (all files were raw). It was a frenzied state of experimentation that, fortunately, ended up well. “The makeup, hair, costume - all of that - was just me. Just me in the classroom, putting shit up on my face, going to the bathroom, being stuck for seven hours.”

One of the most eye-catching visuals in this project is the one on violence. In this visual, Claire attempts to show the soul abandoning the body, which she captures through low shutter speed. In addition, what she seems to be holding is a key, a direct allusion to Pier della Vigna in Canto 12 who held the keys to his king’s heart but later committed suicide.

While the creative process for her first art project may have been chaotic, that has changed over her artistic career. As her MBTI is an INFJ (emphasis on the J), she takes pride in “meticulously planning everything because of the type J. I like to plan everything out.”

Her next project gumiho (구미호), which she was the creative director and stylist for, reflects her need-to-plan inclination. Her mood board has all the specifics of her vision laid out, as well as a Pinterest board that furthers those specifics. Her mood board was full of surrealist art, and one stand-out piece from it would be the fur cup.

“I came across Méret Oppenheim’s fur cup at MoMA, and I learned more about the sculptor. She uses a lot of fur as a nod to sexuality and, recognizing that, combines fur with everyday objects to create a sense of discomfort. I was really inspired by that, so I took the idea of fur and was reminded of the gumiho myth and its themes of gender, sexuality, classism, the grotesque as well as the aesthetic.”

Splitting up the themes of gumiho into the day and night, Claire played with time and duality. While directing her model, she told the model to look like a “submissive domestic housewife” for the visual for the first look (day), and, for the second look (night), the model acted more freely with the gumiho’s true identity being revealed.

A completely different type of project that Claire took on recently was a fashion show. It was by far her biggest project yet. “I was working with fourteen models, five designers, two makeup artists, two styling assistants, and one personal assistant. It was a huge team, and everything was happening at the same time. Styling and makeup were happening at the same time, in the same room. It was a lengthy process.”

This project started with Claire cold emailing a bunch of Korean brands, as well as some FIT and Parson students. She also held model casting auditions. She also recalled the physical labor of putting together the show, such as picking up garments and meeting people downtown.

For this gargantuan project to come together smoothly, Claire had to plan everything meticulously. She showed me her in-depth Pinterest boards that had more in-depth Pinterest boards within them as well as a spreadsheet of the models’ info that looked more like an investment banker’s Excel sheet. 

A lot of the clothes, makeup, and styling featured alluded to Korean culture, probably most prominent in the clothing being reminiscent of Korean traditional clothing hanbok. 

Working with a lot of people for a project is not something Claire is new to. For the film Or, A Frail Correspondence, which she served as the production designer, stylist, hair & makeup artist for, she mentioned how this film had the largest crew she’s worked with. The film uses the loss of virginity to depict themes of absence, loss, and death. “The director wanted to create a sense of limbo, a place in between spaces.

While she wasn’t the director for this project, she was definitely able to have a large role in the creative process. “I didn’t have as much creative say over this project, but I enjoyed interpreting the director’s version, interpreting it, translating it into my ideas, and making it come into reality. One object she got to design was the chair. “I designed this chair, which I found a little funny. There’s an idea of bondage, as well as the use of strings that plays with the idea of hanging in between—again, the theme of limbo.” 

Similar to My 9 Circles of Hell, there were chaotic elements of working on site the whole day. She mentioned pouring plaster and dust on an actor as well as yogurt into an actor’s mouth. The plaster was a bit of a problem though, as it elicited an allergic reaction from the actor.

It was also the first time Claire worked with a naked actor, and as she was in charge of styling and makeup, interacting with a naked actor felt different. But, due to the feeling of being on set, she’s able to set aside her personal opinions and be committed to the professional role.

She also mentioned this addicting feeling of being on set. “It’s like doing a Hackathon, and there’s a deadline. I also have ADHD and work well under time constraints. It’s kind of a challenge that I enjoy. Also, the enjoyment of focus and creating collaboratively is addicting.”

Another medium Claire often frequents is music videos. For music videos, Claire works off of the music. “The music grounds the creative process. I feel like someone’s giving me ideas, and so it’s more of a service to the musician.”

As one can tell by now, Claire has many interests and experiences. But as wide as those are her inspirations as well. Her inspirations aren’t limited to surrealist sculpture. She’s been interested in space-age furniture and interior design. “The shapes of that art inspires my creative ideas.”

One interior design she pointed out as her inspiration was the Headquarters of the French Communist Party. “They may seem like different disciplines, but they seem similar to clothing: silhouettes, textiles, material of construction. With space-age furniture, I’m mostly inspired by the silhouettes.”

In the future, Claire plans to pursue more photography and film. “I get to have the gaze rather than be the object of the gaze. It gives me a sense of power. Sometimes I see photos taken of my work, and I’m not 100% envision it. If I get to caption my work, it’ll align with how I envision it.”

To find more of Claire’s art, you can find her website and her Instagram.

Kelsea Petersen

Feature by Alison Hog

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

Kelsea (she/her) is a junior at Columbia College studying Visual Arts. Through different mediums—oil painting, drawing, intaglio printmaking, illustration—she lets her creativity run free. Though each serves a different purpose, Kelsea loves depicting people she loves and experiences she treasures across mediums. Kelsea speaks softly and smiles brightly, and this love is evident all around her.

I met Kelsea on a rainy Tuesday evening in the lobby of Dodge Hall. As she approached me with a contagious smile, the kind that could easily make anyone forget the somber weather outside, I instantly noticed her clothes were stained with different colors of paint. Home to the School of the Arts, Kelsea suggested meeting in Dodge as she would be there working on a project for her Figure Painting class. I inevitably pictured Kelsea in one of the studios, combining different shades of red, green, and all the brightest colors to bring her latest visions to life. Paint on her oversized gray hoodie, ripped light blue jeans, and white Dr. Marten platform Chelsea boots were only a small price to pay for such creative endeavors.

Kelsea started her artistic journey early in high school when she got into a program after encouragement from a middle school teacher. Serving as her first real introduction to painting, she was soon welcomed into this world of creatives and ever since, has pursued opportunities that have allowed her to fully immerse herself in her art. 

There are three mediums that Kelsea centers on: oil painting, intaglio printmaking, and illustration. Oil painting, she admits, is both her first and favorite form of expression. Kelsea takes pleasure in the creation of portraits inspired by the impact of pop culture, particularly boy bands like One Direction, on teenage girls’ experiences with gender and coming-of-age. Her latest portraiture series beautifully portrays this, depicting her female friends in different spaces and bringing to light their femininity and individuality. The framing of this series was inspired by Harry Styles’s songs that got her through a hard breakup at the beginning of college and, through the inclusion of details and symbols, she hopes to translate the feelings evoked by each of the songs into the essence of the paintings.

For her, these pieces are deeply fascinating and personal. As someone who, just like her, was a teenage girl not so long ago and often finds art to be distant from her experiences in this tumultuous, yet transformative period, I found myself admiring Kelsea’s efforts. Pop culture, and especially pop music in the form of boybands, is a type of media whose power is too easily dismissed as not worth it or even as not sophisticated enough to be explored. Instead, Kelsea is keen to recognize this undermined type of music has dictated a lot of her stages growing up, and so, “it’s a very guiding force in [her] art and also in life,” having the opportunity to immortalize its power in her work.

Between laughs, Kelsea shares how she was initially drawn to capturing the influence of this subculture on teenagers’ lives—their friendships, relationships, exploration of their sexuality—through a project she did on gender performance in One Direction for her University Writing class. Fascinated with what she found, she saw how boybands “is an underrepresented genre in a lot of fine arts, and thought it was interesting to combine both.”

Her portraits are magnetic—while incredibly realistic, they have this dreamlike element to them. “A lot of what I do is what I’ve been calling a Frankenstein method of creating reference images,” Kelsea explains to me when I tell her so. She collages the photographs of her friends with other images to create the final painting and uses layering and wash techniques to emphasize the ever-present details. In terms of color, Kelsea is mostly drawn to the use of pinks, greens, and reds for their vibrancy—which undeniably shines through in her work—arguing how these colors are “sort of looked down upon when it comes to more serious painting,” so she likes having their dramatic effect on her oil paintings to also further highlight her exploration of undermined elements in art. 

Another medium Kelsea has been experimenting with is printmaking, going in this case for a more intricate composition. “I like the very drawn, hyper-detailed sketch look to it,” Kelsea tells me with a warm smile as we look at one of her pieces. In this case, the theme of teenage girls and pop musical culture is less present, leaning more towards inspiration from classical storybooks and magical realism. The storybook frame allows her to exploit that detail-oriented element she enjoys and that, while present throughout her art, especially shines through here with the inclusion of objects that highlight the center figure. 

Still, even in printmaking with its different techniques and overarching themes, she likes using her female friends as inspiration. The piece we’re looking at, for example, has her two childhood best friends as its core in a situation that though normal—doing each other’s make-up—has this magical dimension to it because of its storybook framing and use of only black, white, and yellow.

“They’re such beautiful people inside and out, and I love getting to represent them,” Kelsea shares with me, and her whole face brightens up, warmth quickly reaching her blue eyes. For her, there are memories attached to these works, particularly from the photoshoots used as inspiration, and she believes that in every single class she's taken so far, her friends have been her muses in one way or another. “To my knowledge, all of them so far have liked my drawings of them,” she laughs. “Hopefully.” And I wondered, how could they not? After all,  all of them were so gracefully and generously rendered.

Despite Kelsea’s preference for oil painting and fascination with printmaking, both of which she does for the “sake of art” and have allowed her to “get more personal which [she] love[s],” I soon learned she hopes to pursue a career in digital illustrations. Considering Kelsea’s artistic mastery, it should come as no surprise, then, that she is currently the Illustrations Editor at the Columbia Daily Spectator and the Photo & Art intern for NBC News and TODAY.com. 

I was quite skeptical at first. In my eyes, illustrations for hard news journalism meant renouncing, at least to one extent, one’s creative freedom. Kelsea soon calmed my doubts, “I don’t think you have less artistic freedom because even though the idea that the article comes first, it is the way that you interpret it, your own personal spin on it.” And, by also having to juggle fast deadlines, she has grown more confident in her artistic decisions in the way. “I’m able to be a lot more decisive in my artistic choices in a way I wasn’t before,” she explains. 

All around, what stood out to me is that there is no doubt Kelsea finds delight in the work she does. She likes “really bright colors” which add an alluring vibrancy to her pieces; intricacy and the “joy in painting aggressively;” and capturing tiny moments of life, her own and her friends’. “It’s just fun.”

Moving forward, Kelsea is hoping to improve her techniques across all mediums, hoping to try combining all forms in a dynamic process that brings her art to new heights. She’s thrilled to start working on her senior thesis next year which will expand on her already existing work on “teenage fandom when it comes to music.” Kelsea is also working on shifting to “art to tell a story as opposed to painting a moment in time,” striving to be more conscious about her narrative choices in her following series. 

Through her pieces, Kelsea playfully explores and makes sense of the world around her, a world I want to see through her own eyes—with love, detailed attention, and in all the brightest colors. 

Visit Kelsea’s website to view more of her work.

Yimo Chong

Feature by Casey Epstein-Gross

Photos by Anushka Khetawat

Yimo Chong is an artist, a talented one, but above all else, he’s an activist—and nothing makes that more evident than his paintings. Despite currently working on a series of oil paintings entitled “Progress” (many of which can be seen in this article) depicting the hypocrisy bolstering that titular neoliberal narrative that’s taken both his original home of China and his current home of America by storm, Yimo’s true focus is aimed, laser-sharp, at labor advocacy writ large. A double Politics and Economics major whose academic interests are primarily focused on Latin America (he’s fluent in Spanish and even interned in Chile in 2021), Yimo’s retelling of his life is filled with anecdotes of class consciousness reckonings deserving of memoir: his anarchist awakening was in elementary school when his role as Safety Patrol (no running in the hallways, classmates!) made him question fundamental institutions of power, and he burst into tears upon turning the page of a textbook in high school and learning that Salvador Allende died. But his relationship to art is no less insightful and nuanced than his political awareness; how could it be, when the former has become, for him, almost a manifestation of the latter? For Yimo, painting is both a space separate from the rest of the world that allows him to “regain the sense of a normal life” and an active process that forces the painter to interrogate societal standards of “normalcy,” bringing about an unlearning, a denormalization, of norms themselves.

When did you first begin to take an interest in art? 

It was before primary school, I think. Instead of sending me to a really intense cram school, which is the norm in China, I was very lucky and my parents sent me to this art place, and the teacher was very nice. The moment I realized I liked art was maybe just when the teacher at one point said, like, “Oh, did you know crayons and watercolor don't mix?” And for some reason, little kid me was just, like, “Oh, my God!” My mind was blown. After that, I pretty much just stayed at that art school for a very long time—all the way until I left for the United States in high school.

Is oil painting is still your medium of choice? Did you ever experiment significantly with other art forms, or primarily sketching and oil painting?

There was another period of time during primary school, and middle school, where I also learned Chinese art—this kind of Chinese watercolor thing. It was a totally different style. It didn’t matter whether things looked realistic; you were just supposed to get the vibe. t least from our home, Impressionists learned from Japanese art, and that’s why they started doing that different style in the first place. There was something, like, Daoist about it. I think there’s this sense in a lot of Chinese art that to have something, like, full is actually pretty gaudy, which is why blank space is prioritized so much. I think it’s about being content with some imperfections and actually making them part of the painting. The result is pretty calming.

Obviously, you mostly focus on oil painting these days but are there any remnants of this style, this mindset, that linger in your art or your artistic process even now?

The idea of keeping the important things in the forefront, of making those more detailed, and backgrounding the rest so that it is not overwhelming is still pretty relevant to my art, but more than that, my mindset AND my heart. This sentiment, and art in general, basically reminds me that I should block some time off for, essentially, empty space so that the actual important things can get the room they need. It’s mostly a mentality thing.

What was it about the art school that you went to, about art, that you felt so drawn to?

It definitely wasn’t that I was good at it. I remember there was a time when I tried to be creative, and I wanted to draw a little bird resting on a cloud, and it just looked like it died there. I tried so hard to make it better, but I literally could not figure out how to make it not look dead. It was just a really fun experience. You could draw all of these things and use colors however you want—it felt very freeing. That lack of pressure and being able to just do something out of love is probably why art is the one thing that I’ve continued to do throughout all this time, even when I left for the United States, and even when I came back. 

But then, though, the art school teacher I really liked turned out to be super transphobic. I look very passing right now, so people often get confused or surprised when they hear that I’m trans—but back then, I was not. At that point, I was 14 and I had just come out and it was a time when I needed a lot of support. And, well, she was not very supportive. By now, I had already gone to the United States—it was ninth grade—and there was a girl there who was also transgender, the first trans person I had ever met in my life. She—her name was Emelia Worth—became a really good friend of mine. She was so outgoing; she was the little sun of the entire campus. She invited me to her concert and I remember we had this long talk, and she was just very supportive, and nice, and energetic—she was just, like, everything, you know? And then she had depression. Nobody knew about it. And then she committed suicide. That was one of the first things that, eventually, made me realize how terrible the United States was.

Right, because you were brand new there, so you really had no sense of what it was actually like yet.

There’s this fantasy that, in a lot of places but in my case in China, people have about America, especially middle-class liberals. It’s insane to think about now. We looked at the United States and thought it fixed everything bad and authoritarian and unfair in China, in everywhere. When I first came to the United States, I was 14 and I guess I was not supposed to be this stupid, but I genuinely thought that there were no poor people in the United States. There’s just so much propaganda from the United States but I honestly don’t think it’s as effective as our own propaganda, distributed by diaspora, by people who are just guessing what’s happening that these myths begin to feel like facts. To then go to the United States and experience that suicide so soon after, and to see the school be so unresponsive to it was just very unreal. 

I was really sad, so I came back home for a few weeks that winter, and thought I’d go back to the art studio and do a sketch of Emelia. I wanted to make a postcard, something people could remember her by. That was the first time I ever drew a detailed person, body, face, eyes, and ears altogether. Naturally, I wanted my teacher to take a look at it and see if it was okay. And then she just started doing transphobic stuff. Eventually, she said, “I want to take you to gǔzhēng performances.” The gǔzhēng is a traditional Chinese string instrument, right? There’s this weird belief that if someone is exposed to more traditional Chinese culture, they would just stop becoming transgender. It’s weird! People have weird understandings of what being transgender is. 

Anyways,I switched to a different tutor after that. The thing is, though, I live out of spite. So after that, I was honestly just, like, “I have to finish this and I have to do it well.” It took me a long time but I did eventually make the postcards and send them out to the school—I still have one or two of them. That was another major leap forward in my career; I became much more confident with drawing humans.

What did it feel like when you finished the drawing, considering how charged the entire situation was?

It was just…nice. I picked a picture of Emelia from when she was playing the guitar and she was just in her moment, you know? The happiest. You know how in that Soul movie from Disney when people were in their moment, their soul started floating? This was that moment. 

Was this drawing of Emelia your first endeavor into socially conscious art?

Yes. Although, honestly, I didn’t do much more of it until down the line—I did a series of oil paintings on climate change and animal abuse in AP Art, but that was mostly just because AP Art wanted me to pick a theme, so I picked one. It’s not like I did a lot of research into climate 

change or anything. 

When did your current series — “Progress” — begin? What was the impetus for it? It’s a lot more overtly political than your previous work, so what shifted there for you?

The first painting of the series—not that it was a series yet—started back in 2021, when I quarantining at home during COVID. At this point, I was not very aware of labor problems or capitalism or any of that, at least in China; I had left when I was 14 and I never paid attention to the workers’ situation, which is weird to think about, because I’m Chinese. It was right after the Chinese New Year, and it was COVID, and outside I saw this food delivery worker working. And to work in Beijing, right after the Chinese New Year, and during COVID too, I thought it was insane. The government didn’t give him or any other migrant workers any kind of relief or assistance that would allow people to stay home, but there was nothing, so they just started working, working whatever they could—so that was the first painting with this guy. And I guess it was just this moment of understanding, of realizing that “This is not normal.”

What was it about that moment in particular that struck you—not just politically, but artistically? What about witnessing this made you think “This should be a painting?”

I think it was five o’clock in the morning, and there were festive lanterns still hung up from the Chinese New Year, and this guy was already working. That juxtaposition struck me the most. And right at that moment, I just knew that I should paint it.

Is there something politically salient about painting, or the act of painting? What is it about this specific medium that felt so right to capture these moments for you?

There's something unique in painting, for me, in how much time it forces you to spend on the same thought. You sit on the idea for like two weeks, and then two or three weeks you have to spend just painting. When you sit on something like this for such a long time, you keep reflecting. So when you want to add some details, you think, “Does this fit the situation? What exactly do I want to convey?” It also helps you to denormalize the situation. I never thought that I was “fighting for justice” with these paintings or anything. It just helped begin and illustrate the conversation on labor for me.

I wanted to make sure that painting something that I actually have to unlearn, that the subject is something that I'm reflecting on instead of just following whatever people are talking about at that moment. 

So it’s crucial for you, for this series, to physically witness these moments in time?

Yeah. Take the painting with the women quarantined in the store in Beijing. I think what happened with them was that there was one guy who was on that same street of stores, and he went to a different store, not even their store, but then that guy tested positive, so then everybody in the whole neighborhood went on lockdown. Workers were at risk because they had to go to work, and if they went to work, not only would they have a higher potential of being exposed to COVID, but even if they didn’t, they’d get locked down in their workplace, forced to sleep on hard floors. Other residents, like white-collar workers, weren't locked down in their workplaces, they could still go home. It was such a weird and unfair policy. It wasn’t until I quite literally walked by the interaction shown in the painting that it fully hit me; it was that moment, that feeling of “this is just not fair for them.” These aren’t random people on the news, but real people living real lives forced to exist in unreal conditions, and we can only start to reckon with that when we begin to unpack the “normal” things we otherwise don’t even think to question. 

Right now, the news doesn't really report on this kind of stuff. Instead of finding something that everybody's talking about, I'm trying to find instances where this kind of resistance can start in everyday life. Like, this is also not normal. It's not just "oh, the workers are owed wages, and they're protesting." Of course that's not normal, it's not right that they're owed wages they aren't receiving, but even when they're not protesting or actively being owed wages, this is all still not normal. The status quo is still not good! 

Exactly—people are always like “if only we could go back…” and, like, to when?! To an alternate history or something?

Yeah! It’s crazy. People have this nostalgia for no reason, making them forget so much of reality. That’s why I tried to make this whole series about the things I saw. There needs to be this process where you see a moment, sit on it, and then realize "Wait, this is not normal.” For example, inthe painting of the woman with the trash can, it's normal for her to walk by those gypsum figures, in that coat, in the richest neighborhood in Shenzhen. This is a “normal” situation for—but you have to recognize "No, this is not normal." You have to unlearn that. 

Together, these paintings form your “Progress” series—what does “progress” mean to you, both in the context of the series and in general?

After that first painting, I knew I wanted to start a series just called “Progress” about the liberalization of the Chinese economy, about combating the liberal narrative I grew up with. There’s this illusion of upward mobility when it comes to migrant workers in China, but there aren’t any—they become white-collar workers, capitalists, or shop owners. They don’t do any of that. They just have to continue working for the worst wages in the worst jobs. And this was particularly bad during COVID. But right now, I'm sort of running into a bottleneck of sorts because I haven't been in China for a long time, so it’s not like the last two years during COVID when I saw a lot of people, saw a lot of this kind of stuff.

What’s your focus right now, then?

Right now, I am working for a lot of labor advocacy stuff—I mean, you just have to do something, you know? You see all these workers, you want to do something. Right now, I've been doing a lot of research, and I'm thinking for the future that I will use some of this research and turn them into paintings, even though I haven't seen them in real life? But I'm still deciding because it definitely would break the previous rule about wanting to see something firsthand. Right now, these five paintings have all been following the same rule. Hopefully, I will try to continue focusing on Chinese labor, and I might start to include the research pieces, but I'm still hoping to see something firsthand and then paint it.

Liz Radway

Feature by Sahai John

Photos by Moksha Akil

Liz Radway is a senior at Columbia College studying dance, computer science and math. She enjoys glancing into the future as she experiments with motion capture technology and the mechanization of the body through dance and choreography. Liz spoke with me about the notion of the body as architecture, the future of dance, and blue zones. 

Liz met me in the lobby of her Ruggles dorm in a red checkered sweater, ripped blue jeans, and a pair of cow earrings. She welcomed me into her room where I sat on a soft pink couch tucked between her bed and the window. The bookshelf full of texts on dancers and computer science, a black and white mat with the same checkered pattern as her sweater, and small hanging disco balls that reflected rainbows onto my pants as the light from the window grazed them all made me feel immediately cozied into a world of Liz. She filled this oasis on Frat Row with the music of an Etta James soundtrack playing from a record player next to her book shelf. As I sat on her couch, waiting for her to bring our waters, I could picture Liz playing a song on this and dancing on the checkered mat, creating what might be the start of one of her mesmerizing pieces of choreography or improv… Liz lifted the needle from the record player, pausing the song, and began to tell me about her career in dance. 

Liz started taking dance classes with her sister when her mom enrolled them both after finding out that there was a sibling discount. Since then, Liz tells me, “it's always been a part of my life.” She started choreographing professionally during covid. “I wanted to do things on my own terms,” she tells me, “that's when I started getting interested in choreography.” Recently, Liz has been choreographing pieces that experiment with the notion of the body as architecture. “It's something that I've been exploring this semester, as I've been exploring Trisha Brown's movement. Her idea of the body as architecture is something a little bit different than how I've been interpreting it and putting it to use for myself. For her, it's the notion of almost perfection within the body in its positionality. For me, it's the acceptance of positionality in the body and movement, on its own. It's something beautiful and artistic, it can tell stories and can be designed. I’m less interested in the idea of there being a right and wrong and more in the idea of occupying space in a way that tells meaning and is beautiful.”

I asked Liz what that process of choreographing pieces and telling stories through them looks like for her. “I definitely like to keep my work thematic so it has something the audience can cling on to and kind of interpret on their own. But I'm trying to stay away from rigid narratives.” For Liz’s full length works, she takes a phrase of choreography and builds from there to create a story that the audience can interpret. “I think different types of dance serve different purposes,” Liz explains. “The point of improv, for me, is just to have fun, get out some energy, move my body, take a step back from the day and just move around. With choreography, the point is to either get something across or, with some pieces, I feel like the dancers are just trying not to throw up through it. My piece [in CoLab’s ‘The Big Jam’] is definitely like that. There’s going to be a lot of heaving and hawing at the end but it’s so much fun.”

Liz also finds inspiration from working with other choreographers to explore different ways of performing her works and experimenting with different themes. She’s choreographed for Orchesis and Colab and, for her senior creative thesis, she has been working with David Dorfman to incorporate spoken word in her solo. 

Liz also enjoys working with her friends to mesh their personal interests with dance. “My two friends, Katie and Abby, and I worked on a piece for The Movement lab Festival and it's very much narrative based in a fun, silly way. Last year, we did a piece centered around space exploration. And this semester… Do you know the blue zones?” Liz asks me. “They're these pockets of Earth where people live to be centenarians, like 100 year olds. We've been thinking about that a lot. Our piece [The Blue Zone] is focused on that. It's centered around the sea. I thought that was a fun little pun off the blue zone and it's also where the oldest life has been throughout the Earth's history.” 

Leg

Through dances like these, Liz taps into her interest in creative technology as she explores the evolution of the world and intelligent systems. Liz is interested in generative choreography and machine learning generated improvisation. This has inspired her to create her own model that can generate improvisatory movement. She’s been using motion capture technology to collect data for this and “make some fun art with it.” In one of her performances, Liz straps on bands with glowing green sensors around her arms, legs, hips, and head and then dances. A white, robotic figure is projected onto a screen behind her, moving with her. As the figure rolls its automated hips and prances across the screen in the same expressive way that Liz moves through the space, her seemingly disparate interests in dance and computer science appear completely in sync. 

“It definitely is where the future of dance has to head,” Liz tells me, explaining how creative technology has become more and more involved in the dance world. Liz enjoys being a part of this evolution in dance. “I think it's fun to just peek into what the world can be like. That's the way that I see a lot of AI generated stuff, moving with dance to replicate improvisation on stage and interact with it.” 

I asked Liz what she foresees for her own evolution and future in dance. She explained to me that there wasn’t a single moment when she felt like she had found her passion in dance. “It's always been there. And I could never imagine my life without it.” Liz tried to take some space away from dance this summer and it made her realize that from then on she wants to soak it up as much as possible. “I have a very specific memory of being a freshman in high school and being like, ‘Oh my god, I have four more years left to dance here until it's college.’ I didn't know what the future of me in dance would look like at that point. I just remember being devastated and freaking out about what I would do in a post-dance life.” Liz explained to me that she’s still there a little bit, trying to figure out what the future holds for her in dance but feeling confident that she wants it to remain a part of her life in some way. 

“I always want to keep dancing and I always want to keep choreographing,” She explains. “The economy right now is not really one that's geared towards supporting artists and dance is not really placed as a valued art form right now, at least financially. In terms of receiving any funding, I'm not really quite sure how to figure that out yet. But I think that dance in America is alive and well. And I think that there's a lot of places where it's occurring. And a lot of underground places too. In dance history, all of the new ideas have come from these underground places, and eventually percolated upwards.” Liz hopes to remain a part of the long history of dance and traverse these creative spaces.  

Moving forward, Liz intends to keep challenging herself in dance and choreography by incorporating new mediums. Film is on the horizon for her next. “I haven't really stepped into that territory before, dancing or choreographing for film. I'm not really sure what that entails yet so that's something I want to explore.”

I used to dance when I was a lot younger and I’ve always found myself easily drawn to dance. Anytime I watch a really good dance performance or performer, I feel a little tug at that younger me that makes me want to get up and dance. Watching Liz perform, I feel like I am being grabbed by the hand and pulled in to dance with her. 

You can find clips of Liz’s incredible dances and information on where to watch her perform in person on her instagram.

Maddie Breeden

Feature by Sayuri Govender

Photos by Alicia Tang

The Computer Music Center at Columbia, or the CMC, is tucked away into the side of 125th’s Prentis Hall–obstructed by concrete buildings and scaffolding. It is a secret gem of Columbia, a hidden garden only for those bold enough to brave its cracked ceilings, open electrical wiring, and commitment to spending hours there. For Maddie Breeden, her fresh dive into experimental music began here, in the CMC room with the modular synthesizer. She spends two hours a week in it, making music for her classes, her band, and hopefully, a debut album. 

Maddie’s relationship with music has grown and evolved alongside her over the years. Her deep connection to music began with her father, who was constantly playing synthy 80s music–like  New Order and The Human League–as Maddie grew up, slowly creating the sonic palette that resonates with her today. She also played the flute for her entire childhood, until the orchestra program was cut at her school in the middle of her high school career. Despite the loss of the music program, the musical discipline she learned at a young age persisted into her later life. She would go on to teach herself to play guitar, saying how she “loved the creative freedom I had with it, because I could write my own songs on the guitar.” Throughout Maddie’s life, music has been a constant thread. She grew up in Washington D.C, where she was exposed to the vast genres within the lesser known D.C music scene. “There's a Southern influence to the music scene there,” she tells me, “it gave me an almost Southern way of playing the guitar, which I think is pretty unique and special”. She also takes inspiration from D.C’s hardcore scene in the 80s, consisting of bands like Fugazi, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains. However, she revealed to me her biggest inspiration from home is not the D.C music scene, but the river by her house. She smiles shyly when she tells me, and I can perfectly picture her sitting by a creek, quietly recording the sound so she can try to modulate it later. “I do my best writing when I'm close to water” she professes, “I love the sound. When you listen to a song and get completely lost in it, it's like the feeling of waves on your body. In my music, I want there to be waves of sound that hit the listener.” 

Maddie seeks to achieve these waves of sound with the modular synthesizer, a new tool in her life that has completely transformed how she creates music. This past year, in her digital music class, she learned how to use a Digital Audio Workstation, or DAW, and the modular synthesizer. “It opened me up to a lot more sounds that I've been wanting to make,” she mused, “ones that I've been hearing in my head and I can now actualize in my music.” When I ask her to explain to me the process of using the modular synth, she smiles and says “let me show you!” I watch as Maddie kneels down to the huge, black box covered in nodes, switches, plugs, and flickering lights. She takes a plug and inserts it into two outlets diagonal from each other. A booming synth rings out as she tells me about voltage control oscillators, sine waves, clock sequences, and frequency filters. As I try to keep up with the terminology, I feel like I’m learning a secret language. I realize the music Maddie hears is so different from the music I hear–her ear trained in picking up a song’s distorted tom drums or low modulators, like she knows the full recipe of a meal after taking only one bite. “It's not like a typical musical instrument directed around chord melodies,” she explains, “you have no idea what sound you're going to create, which is why it's so fun. Sometimes, when I'm writing a song, I really struggle with trying to perfect it. But I can come to this with an open mind and create something awesome without thinking twice about it. You can't recreate the sound; it just happens.” Despite her skilled use of the modular synth, she discloses to me how much more she still has to learn. “I learned how to do this by just experimenting and playing with it,” she reveals, telling me how much more she wants to learn and what new genres she wants to dive into (currently, she and her bandmate Lolo have been experimenting with playful disco beats–just another genre to add to her diverse discography).

Maddie is struck by the concept of unpredictability, a theme that seeps into her demos. She describes her struggle with finding footing in formulaic chord progressions and song structures, expressing how musical standards never fully resonated with her until she broke free of the structure and discovered the creative freedom of experimental music. “You don't have to follow the rules that are set just because they're popular, or because that's what people expect of you. Experimental music has allowed me a lot more creative freedom.”  Her sound is the manifestation of her unpredictable dreamscape–airy, jarring, melodic, and exploratory. Her most cherished song, Etretat, named after a village in France she once visited, combines a gentle electric guitar riff with a synthy humming–coming together in a dreamy beat overlaid with biting electronic chords that build into a thrumming voltaic end. “I love the meshing of electronic music sounds with something delicate” Maddie muses, “I love incorporating the modular synthesizer into dream pop-esque music in order to create a shock or a sound you're not expecting; it keeps the listeners on their toes a little bit.” 

Her journey into this more experimental music began during her study abroad last spring in the UK. Introduction to the UK’s post punk groups–such as Black Country, New Road, Jockstrap, Black Midi, and Opus Kink–combined with the prevalence of experimental and techno music allowed Maddie to explore genres of music in a way she hadn’t before. Maddie told me how she also joined the Indie Music Society, a group of bands in Scotland that met to discuss music and share their work. Her friends in the group pushed her to make music with the same devotion they did. She tells me how “I was able to allow myself to be open to creating, centering my music creation. A product of doing that was allowing myself to listen to other types of music and realize their power and how interesting they are. There’s a structure to the noise, and that’s awesome.” 

I’m almost reminded of that infamous NYU Masterclass video, in which singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers shows Pharrell Williams her song Alaska–to which Williams shockingly tells her, “I have 0 notes” after hearing it. The reason the song is so striking is because it reflects Rogers musical journey, as she explains how she grew up as a folk singer but after studying abroad in France and having a spiritual experience with dance music there, her relationship to music completely transformed. Maddie’s musical journey–while different–still holds that idea of having a strong piece of one’s musical past transformed by the introduction of a previously unheard of music scene in a city far away. I realize there’s something magical about being in a new city, alone and young, being held together by the songs you come across–letting it shape who you become and what you create. When we get to step out of the everyday Columbia bubble, the thing quietly beating inside us gets to take form, as if it's been there all along and was merely waiting for a calling. 

These days, Maddie is working towards releasing new music on her own and with her bandmate and drummer, Lolo. “It's been challenging to create the sound you feel in the room and translate it to an audio file,” she confesses, “But we want to get our music out there so that people can listen. I’m trying to put out at least a few songs by the end of the semester.” Her determination to release music is in part due to an illuminating conversation with an old friend and music teacher from home, who respectively told her how much they loved her music from high school and want more of it. “Having those conversations made me realize it's my duty to produce something and give back by inputting something out into the world. It can be a lot to juggle, but I know I have this obligation to new music.” She played me a snippet of two songs she's been working on–one a thrumming electronic beat with snappy and buzzing synth inspired by indie rock band Spirit of the Beehive, and the other a haunting single-string guitar melody with a build into electronic drums and piano that she only started the day before. Each is completely different from each other, but also intrinsically Maddie. She tells me how she’s been struggling with the notion of making a cohesive theme in her music. However, to me, I feel like the theme is obvious: it's all grounded in the fact that she was the one who created it. The reproduction of her dreamscape, of her mind and the sounds within it, are all immersed within the music she's made. It's a sound that recreates a Southern guitar influence combined with a passion for experimental music abroad–a sound that has a journey within that reflects Maddie’s own.  

From writing songs in her teenage bedroom using GarageBand and a MIDI keyboard, to taking on the intricate and complex modular synthesizer, Maddie’s musical journey has grown up alongside her. She reflects on how the musical practices she developed when she was younger are still with her (the Alvvays songs she first learned on guitar in high school are forever embedded within her fingertips when she plays). Maddie’s pure joy and adoration for music is the vehicle for her intricate and impactful songs, as she embeds her experiences in venues across the world into dreamy guitar riffs and idiosyncratic synths. Maddie articulates the sensational feeling of music, contemplating how “When I’m dancing somewhere, I feel the music. It speaks to me and takes over my body in a way that I can't explain. You just get lost in it, and lost in your own world”. The ephemeral, glittering, intangible experience of music is built into the core of what Maddie does. She describes to me a poem by David Berman, the lead singer of the Silver Jews (a 90s indie rock band she listened to growing up), called “And the Others”. “Berman talks about this ‘Light’ that you cannot see,” she tells me “He says how the light shines for all these different people in different ways [such as literature, art, or sexuality] but it shines. 

For me, the light comes from my music.” 

Olivia Wein

Feature by Anushka Pai

Photos by Alicia Tang

Like many young teens, Olivia Wein channeled her middle school growing pains through art. Unlike most of us, 13 year old Wein received commissions and features in magazines, propelling her into a near-decade career in photography. 

I met with Olivia in her dorm, where we spoke over tea. 

“Child Prodigy, yeah it’s hard.” 

I couldn’t have said it better myself. We had much to cover–a decade's worth of transformation, emotion, and documentation. Wein got her start photographing her best friend. She described their lifelong friendship, meeting when they were practically the only two babies in Williamsburg, “before they opened a Chanel and Hermes down there.” She credits her best friend’s beauty as her inspiration. 

“It felt compulsive…like a moth to a flame.” 

Both Wein and her friend come from families of artists. Surrounded by creativity, they were overwhelmed by ideas of art, friendship, and New York. They grew up during the peak of Tumblr–there was no better time to try on new aesthetics and embody teen angst. 

Wein’s first commission was for designer, Susan Alexandra. The two met through frequent visits to Jill Platner’s jewelry shop, a favorite of Wein’s mother. With every visit, Alexandra encouraged a then-12-year-old Wein to pursue the arts. 

“She was one of those people who’s like, hey girl, here’s what your life is gonna look like.”

Alexandra eventually reached out to Wein via her Instagram, requesting she shoot for the brand. With a bag full of jewels, Wein and her friends dressed up for a photoshoot. Many photos were used to promote the brand, marking the start of Wein’s commercial career. 

Wein’s youthful take on photography did not go unnoticed. She was commissioned by magazines such as Sweet and Nylon Japan, providing a platform for Wein to document the often overshadowed wisdom of a teen girl. 

Wein’s career followed a similar trajectory to Rookie Magazine founder, Tavi Gevinson, whose mention led us on a tangent. Listening to the youngest creatives allows for an entirely new understanding of fashion, culture, and life itself.

“Rookie was such a huge part of my life. I still don’t think there’s anything like that for young people. I think there’s room for kids to make things for other kids.”

When asked about how her photography evolved over the decade, Wein emphasized what stayed the same. The feeling of the craft– being moved through looking, has been a constant throughout Wein’s career. Wein described shooting as meditative, engaging her so deeply she feels removed from her body. 

The euphoric qualities of photography, however, could not prevent Wein from second-guessing her career path. An experience most of us go through, yet without years of commercial success, is the identity crisis of adulthood. What we once enjoyed in our youth becomes unappealing, and we feel the urge to push it away. Wein grappled with her new priorities, no longer wanting to use photography to try on new identities. 

“I used to want us dirty at house shows, smoking cigarettes, and wearing demonias. I wanted to take photos of dead pigeons. And then suddenly I didn’t want that anymore…I was like oh fuck, I’m falling out of love with this, and I’ve accidentally made a career.” 

Wein’s struggle to find creative direction led her to film. The medium moved her so deeply that she planned to leave photography behind. For Wein, photography embodied something old and outdated, while film seemed to be new and exciting. 

Wein’s muses are her loved ones, whom she depicts in photos and film. I was most intrigued by her description of her boyfriend. While Wein has depicted her relationships through photography for the past decade, she finds her boyfriend best represented through words and film. 

“There’s something that feels small about a photo. With film, there’s time, change, and dialogue–which I associate with him. The feeling of him being with me comes up through the film.” 

Wein prefers to shoot moments that feel natural, not posed. She mentioned how subjects such as her best friend and little brother are better captured through photography. I was struck by Wein’s attention to detail and drive to represent her loved ones’ characters.

Recently, Wein had a breakthrough about the future of her photography and film career. Rather than viewing these mediums in opposition, she found that they are deeply intertwined. This interconnectedness allowed her to bring photography into the present, rather than it being an emblem of her childhood. 

“Photography is like film in pieces. That makes me feel like it’s connected to who I am right now.”

Wein’s new focus has led her to pursue various directorial, production, and screenwriting projects. Most recently wrote and directed her first short film, The Mascot. Simultaneously, Wein’s photography career is still in full swing–she regularly shoots for brands such as Jill Platner while also pursuing her own creative projects. Post graduation, Wein plans to get her MFA in film, continue working, and move back to Brooklyn with her friends. 

Renny Gong

Feature by Mara Toma

Photos by Anaïs Mitelberg

Renny Gong (he/him) has a very pleasant smile, takes many pauses in conversation, and his preferred beverage at the Hungarian Pastry Shop is black coffee. He prefers black coffee not because he is particularly fond of Hungarian’s black coffee but because he is able to refill his beverage as much as he pleases [pro-tip: order black coffee if you don’t want to keep paying for those fluffy cappuccinos]. Due to popular demand, I never got a chance to taste the stew he sold in Lerner, but something tells me that he would put a lot of joy into any culinary endeavor he undertakes. If in luck, you might be able to hear Renny singing a Justin Bieber hit over karaoke (perhaps at a certain poetry open mic night). I was minutes or maybe even seconds away from witnessing both Renny’s cooking and singing… I hope I’ll get to eat his food and hear his singing one day. Renny describes himself as a flash-fiction writer.

Mara Toma– What’s one thing that made you feel something today?

Renny Gong –  I wanted to show you something. Look at this! I have a carabiner attached to my pants and there are a bunch of keys on it. When I stand up, it (really) jangles [Renny gets up at this point]. I put it on for the last few days, and today in particular… I knew I wanted to show Mara [you]. 

MT—  Is  that specific to today?

RG—  It’s specific to the last few days because I rediscovered it in my possessions. I forgot about it a little bit but now it is fully part of my aesthetics. My friend Andy (one of my best friends), a very sweet guy, decided to get me this as a birthday present. Interestingly, these keys don’t do anything… they're simply decor. Isn’t that so funny?

MT— It is. And there is an interesting musicality too, you now.

RG—  It’s a very annoying musicality. I walk around and I clang clang everywhere. He [Andy]  went into a key store and asked if he could have their spare keys, and picked all the ones that  looked weird. 

MT— Now that I am getting to know you a bit more… If you had a day to yourself and you could do anything you wanted to, how would you spend it?

RG— I’d go to the Hungarian Pastry Shop–  I honestly feel at my best there. One thing that I love about the Hungarian Pastry Shop is that it’s very loud and there’s no music, and one feels very consumed by noise. There is also nothing piercing through the noise so you can feel fully bothered… which I enjoy. I'd also like to play a game– it can be Gomoku or this other game called Sheng Ji. Sheng Ji is a Chinese card game played by 4 or more players… It's my favorite game in the world. Hungarian Pastry Shop, play a game, black coffee, and I’d like to be on some sort of transportation vehicle, but not a car. I want to be on a train or a bus. I’d like to go somewhere and come back. I would also call my mom. 

MT— I am curious… What attracts you to transportation?

RG—I feel like I’ve done something once I’ve transported. If I am just around I don’t feel as good as when I’ve left. You know how some people say things like “I’ve got to get out of the city, or I've got to get out of Morningside Heights, or I've got to get off campus”... I feel that constantly. 

MT— Shifting gears a little bit. I feel like your work may be interpreted in a number of ways.  It could be read as poetry, prose, or even song sometimes– especially in your shorter pieces, your writing’s identity can appear fluid. Do you defy classification?

RG — I don’t want people to think I am a poet… I don’t know why. There is nothing wrong with a person who writes poems; poems are really good, and poets are nice. I don’t know that I want to be a poet because I’ve set out to become a fiction writer.

MT— As a writer, what does your creative process look like?

RG– Do you make art? 

MT– I am not an artist, but I doodle. 

RG— What is your creative process for doodling?

MT— I feel bored and then I doodle. 

RG— It’s the same thing then– I feel bored and I doodle. I am always trying to think about someone’s voice. If the first line sounds good, then it will work. At least initially, it’s about how it sounds. If it sounds good at first then it will carry throughout the piece. Most artistic process is coming up with a nice first sentence. Also, writing has to sound like someone’s speaking. 

MT– How do you construct that voice, that someone-speaking effect?

RG— I say it out loud. If it sounds like someone, it’s good. 

MT– Something else that struck me about your work is that it seems to be rooted within a very specific moment in time. It almost feels like a photograph that immortalizes a very specific experience, feeling, or event. What’s the role of temporality in your writing?

RG — My work tends to get very into one moment. I don’t want to make any generalizations.  It’s a difficult task to make generalizations about the world. Statements like “that’s why you should never get into a car with a stranger” or “hurt people hurt people” are bad things to write. Instead, the way to achieve some sort of greater meaning is to dig deeper into a specific meaning. That way, you can illuminate deep into one moment, and that can actually help you understand something. 

MT — In addition to dealing with a very specific moment in time, a lot of your work engages  two parallel interior and exterior worlds that are constantly interacting with one another. 

RG— The two are always interacting with one another. I write more “exterior,” though… I want to let the reader figure out the interior. It’s harder to purely write the interior without the exterior. You can say something like “I felt sad” which is not interesting. Instead, you can describe the outcomes of sadness and that way the thing itself is much more sad… and you feel more from that. If I say “I felt sad,” you don’t actually empathize with me. But if I say I did something dramatic and I’ll tell you what the dramatic thing was then you’ll empathize with me. It’s more valuable to write about the exterior as a way to illuminate the interior. 

MT — What strikes me is that even though you are firm in the fact that you are a fiction writer, your work is written exclusively in first person and is filled with many details that read as autobiographical. How does your identity interact with the work?

RG — All fiction is completely autobiographical– there is no escaping autobiography. If you make up a story, the elements of that story are still you. There is no point of distinction…  everything is me and everything is you. If I incorporate non-fiction elements in my writing that doesn’t make it less fiction. And all storytelling, even "nonfiction" storytelling, is an act of lying. You are always choosing what to share and not share… The prose doesn’t suddenly become better or worse if it’s fiction or nonfiction. It’s not very enjoyable to draw the line between fiction and non-fiction. If you decide that it’s better or worse because it’s fiction or nonfiction, then you are not paying attention to the right things. If you say it’s one thing or another, that’s not interesting. For instance, if you ask your crush if they are into you, and they say “yes” or “no” then the crush is over. 

MT– For some people it’s the beginning of a burgeoning relationship though. 

RG– Yes it’s true, but the crush is over. Or, the infatuation or the crush may not be over, but something is over. 

MT– The mystery is over maybe? The delusion?

RG–  Yes, the delusion is over. And delusion is engaging… 

MT- When reading your work I felt an informality about it that felt joyful and freeing. How would you characterize the role of joy in your work?

RG—[Instead of answering my question, Renny told me 7 facts about animal sex. According to him, that was more interesting and I think I agree.]

MT– When reading your work,  I felt that your writing sometimes resists endings. Would you say this is true?

RG— My dad says it does. But no, I don’t resist endings. I think about endings very carefully, how to land them, where to land, in what fashion to land. I think all my stuff has carefully considered endings. 

MT–... I don’t think your endings are not carefully considered– I just think some of your prose resists that finite end. 

Columbia professor Sam Lipsyte, who I am doing an independent study with this semester, says that an ending should look like this

[At this point, Renny takes out a notebook and draws two circles. For the first circle, he connects the beginning point with the end point, “a full circle” whereas for the second circle he draws a circle but instead of connecting the beginning to the end the line isn’t fully connected.  

A short story should end like this [points to the second circle] so that it achieves an almost closure. That’s something I think about for endings. 

MT– Finally, you mentioned working on a novel. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

It’s about a bunch of kids playing ping-pong in rural China. A bunch of wacky shit happens… The kids have some issues. One of the kids, for instance, is twelve years old and has an alcohol problem. His name is Jean-Pierre. There’s a guy named Durian [who is the other main character, I would say]. He loves karaoke. There’s a guy who draws porn for money. They all get really mistreated by the coaches. And there’s a lot of rule-explaining–telling how ping-pong works. 

But mainly, it’s a story about the main character and his mother. 

MT– … inspired by autobiography?
RG– 10% of it. The setting is all autobiography, but all the content is not. 

MT— do you play ping pong?

RG— yeah. That’s the main history of my life: table tennis. I’ve pivoted into the second phase of my life: writing. The first phase is called table tennis and the second phase is writing. 

You can find more of Renny’s work here: www.rennygong.com 

Meinzer

Written by Katharine Lee

Photos by Grace Schleck

As a child, I would hide inside the clothing racks in department stores while waiting for my mother to finish her shopping. I spent many afternoons enveloped in rising clouds of dust and the soft, downy curtains of fabric. Occasionally, someone would remove a blouse from the rack, illuminating a hand, a torso, and a brief, thin sliver of light. For those who didn’t care to look too closely, I remained unseen — possessing, for a moment, the illusion of invisibility. 

Meinzer’s work reminded me of this memory: the temporary shelter from the external world, the desire to seek privacy in public spaces, and the preciousness of self-indulgence. Whether through sculpture, printmaking, or textile design, Meinzer and their objects aim to return bodily agency to the user – a process entangled in paradoxes, and in the acquisition of new consciousness.  

Screen

Meinzer’s dislike of machines, including cell phones, meant that the interview almost didn’t happen. They had texted the wrong number, agreeing to meet in Hungarian to chat. Later, Meinzer mentioned their “book of inconveniences, which is basically just a book of things [they] hate.” I imagined a page dedicated to cellular devices, expounding at length over the futility of technology, and the word-swallowing void into which Meinzer’s text had disappeared, unopened. 

We did end up meeting, after some last-minute relocation, on the first floor of Dodge, due to Hungarian’s perpetual lack of seating. I first noted the firmness of Meinzer’s handshake. At the time, I didn’t know about Meinzer’s love of color, which they attributed to their legacy of working with painting. They were dressed in black and white, a juxtaposition of colors they enjoy, inspired by their work with inks and dyes at an internship for a screen printer. There, Meinzer discovered their secret superpower: someone could point to a computer, say, “I want this color,” and Meinzer would mix it perfectly, despite never having taken a formal color theory class. 

“Tell me about yourself” revealed several more important facts about Meinzer: they’re from Austin, Texas; their favorite food is dino nuggets and Diet Coke (although “it's actually pretty hard just finding dino nuggets down here, so I really struggle with that,” Meinzer observed); and that they simply would not survive life without their squishy pillow. 

It occurred to me that I knew which pillow Meinzer was referring to. Selfies, a series of self-portraits drawn with charming crudeness on kitakata paper, depicts Meinzer swimming, stretching, and walking, among other poses. One print features Meziner hugging the squishy pillow to their chest. There is something relatable and honest about it — the bluntly drawn arms encircling the object, the familiarity and comfort of the embrace. 

“With the subject matter, I just didn't want to think about it. I was like, ‘Oh, here's me today,’” Meinzer said. “Also, I’m really self obsessed. All the self portraits and the selfies are kind of a continuation of that self-ness, I would say.” 

As a nonfiction writer, I was interested in this: the raw depiction of a self. I explained my own work in personal narrative, how I was beginning to tire of myself, the first person, and the “I”’s dotting the page. “It all feels vaguely narcissistic,” I said. Meinzer agreed with this; they also have concerns about self depiction. They spend a lot of time in front of the mirror. They’ve seen so many photos of themselves and drawn themselves in so many different ways that they’re no longer sure what their face looks like. Their fingers skim their cheek as they tell me this, as if to confirm their physical presence. “Looking at your image, you can become really disconnected with yourself,” they said. It’s a disconcerting experience similar to being in a room with multiple mirrors, where you’re forced to confront many reflections of yourself from all sides. Looking at yourself, I realized, is not necessarily synonymous to seeing yourself.

Meinzer investigates their perceived disconnect between mind and body through the 30 second process of printmaking, which was how the Selfies were made. Printmaking is Meinzer’s way to shake off their technical training in drawing and painting in favor of an “intuitive type of making,” which they find akin to muscle memory. “I want things that put me back in my body,” Meinzer, who described themself as anti-movement, explained. “I really have a hard time feeling like I'm living in my body. I feel like I spend a lot of time in my head. But I’m not going to think myself back into my body, I’m going to get myself back in by feeling something.”

It’s important to Meinzer that audiences are grounded by the tactical element of their work, that they remember how to sit and interact and use things. Meinzer’s objects evoke a choreography of the body, urging users to consider the ways they traverse through space, and what they can touch and do. The objects are situated in an environment that can’t be “beige and millenial,” but possesses its own visual language. 

Knees

This is apparent in The Dollhouse, which houses Meinzer’s alter egos, Baby Dyke and Lady Darling. The objects within the dollhouse, from the dolls to the furniture themselves, exist to facilitate play and conceptualize Meinzer’s past and present selves – allowing for a growth of consciousness. I press Meinzer on their definition of consciousness as something we continually attain throughout our lives. Do we become more distant from ourselves as we grow older? Part of me assumed, naively, that The Dollhouse was a nostalgic attempt to return to childhood. 

Meinzer’s definition of play, however, is more intertwined with one’s submission to fantasy – sustaining the make believe. It’s something kids do all the time, Meinzer said: “If you’re playing a magical character, you’re not delusional. You’re submitting to fantasy. It’s how kids learn empathy. It’s a great tool for imagination. And we lose that in puberty when we become really aware of the gaze.” Slipping into a different self – a metamorphosis that occurs when you remove yourself from external perceptions of you – is something that fascinates Meinzer. It’s a phenomenon that happens with drag, BDSM, and within the trans community, they added. They view themselves as an amalgamation of many different selves and aggregate identities; in play, there is no awareness of fulfilling a role. The new, embodied self doesn’t necessarily imitate who you are in real life, but is unequivocally you.  

The follow-up question naturally became, “Is there a way to teach people this?” I pulled up the first page of their portfolio, where they described themselves as “interested in crafting games.” Were games the best medium to activate the confrontation of self? 

“I hate games,” Meinzer said bluntly. 

“What?” I was incredulous; yet this, I soon discovered, would be my introduction to one of their many paradoxes. 

“I'm not interested in games that are traditional, like a board game or a card game or something with a set objective, or way to win,” they explained. “And while I can see the merit and satisfaction in organizing yourself in relation to that sort of structure, I'm personally so bored by it. People get really defensive when I talk about this, especially board game lovers.” 

I pointed out the window. “I think I see them coming,” I said. “They’re rallying on the walkway and they’re all holding Monopoly.” 

“Yeah, if you’re [a board game lover] reading this, cool it,” Meinzer said. 

One game Meinzer does enjoy, though, is arrangement. Their piece, Anti-Puzzle, debuted at Caffeine Underground in Bushwick, and features birch plywood puzzle pieces meant to be assembled on the printed wood table. There is no making Anti-Puzzle, no correct order it can be arranged. It also doesn’t reference anything – it doesn’t take on the elaborate shape of a duck, for example. Instead, how much of the game people can take into their own hands, and apply their own experience and intrigue to the rules, is Meziner’s metric for whether a piece was successful. They recalled the different approaches users took with Anti-Puzzle: some tried to arrange all the patterned pieces together, while others stacked them like blocks. “That was the best thing that happened, because I would have never thought to do that,” Meinzer said. “Other people had covered the table completely so that all of the holes were hidden. And they were like, ‘Oh, did we win the game?’ And I was like, ‘Sure, yeah.’”

Anti-Puzzle

Still, Meinzer recognizes that they actually are operating under a set of rules: their audiences are not puppets, and they aren’t the puppet master. “It’s such an artist’s ego thing,” they said. “Like, you really want control over everything. And then when you bring people into it, it’s hard.” To Meinzer, the difficulty of relational aesthetics, and the participatory element of their work, lies in the tension between knowing what to give and not giving too much. “I don’t want people to be used as a medium as opposed to just interacting with a piece,” they continued. “I am realizing how desperate I am for a very specific pattern of use. But then it's also like, I'm not interested in having wall text that says, ‘You can use this.’ That sucks.”

The variability of setting comes up here; would a gallery be the best environment for Meinzer’s pieces? Would they kill the casualness of the objects? These are questions Meinzer is still trying to figure out. They launch into another paradox: how their intuitive side of making is constantly wrestling with their intense planning side. Because their objects are meant for use, the piece needs to be referent enough to everyday objects, and not abstract to the point where the purpose of picking it up and interacting with it is completely lost. Even if there are certain rules in place, concedes Meinzer, they’re “definitely trying to really obscure the set of rules.” 

With Anti–Puzzle, a game’s structure can and should be constructed by the user, whose agency depends on decision-making. When does the game start and finish? What are the rules of the game? These are questions the piece asks of the audience, meant to spur the activation of bodily awareness and co-creation on the users’ part. “The game can even be changed halfway through,” Meinzer added. “If you’re bad at the game you’re currently playing, you can definitely change the rules.” 

To eliminate the performativity of the gallery space, Meinzer posited whether the best way to interact with their objects is in a room alone, without the acute awareness that others are watching you use the piece. I argued against this, because part of Anti-Puzzle’s appeal to me was its ability to form community, the way strangers were drawn together, even if briefly, to work on the tessellation together. 

Meinzer shrugged. Maybe it’s a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. Ambiguity can be desirable. “If the piece fails, it says something about the space around us, the social rules that are assigned to that certain space,” Meinzer said. “Your pieces are smarter than you and they should teach you. You don’t need to know 1000% what your piece is doing.” 

A new concept Meinzer is working on now involves unlocking a new level of bodily agency in the audience by encouraging the destruction of their artwork. It’s a pushback against their observed preciousness with art objects in the art world – “do they need to be treated that preciously?” They brought up Ray Johnson’s mail art, in which cheap pieces of paper are streaked with crayola marks, chafed by the mailbox, and carry the indentations of the hands that have held, opened, and transported the material. These signs of wear inspire Meinzer deeply. . There’s something beautiful about imperfection: the undeniable affectation of time and flesh. 

“[With Anti-Puzzle], people were putting their iced coffee down, and it was condensating on the table,” Meinzer said, following our dialogue on signs of use. “Thankfully, or I don’t know, not thankfully, there were no marks left, but had there been a mark left, I realize I kind of would have been excited by that.” 

This nonchalant approach doesn’t mean that Meinzer isn’t protective of their objects. They recalled a time their friend almost damaged the Anti-Puzzle, which freaked them out. It was another paradox they were grappling with: how open were they really to a piece being altered? When I explained my reaction to “For When You Want to be Alone” as a shelter, they countered by saying many had the opposite reaction – they found the environment hostile. To a certain extent, this accomplishes the goal of their work: “I want people to feel some sense of discomfort but also feel very safe,” Meinzer said. “It can’t just be this sanctuary safe space sort of thing. I’m trying to find ways to include risk or destruction or violence into the work…[to incorporate] some sort of decision making or risk within.” 

Overall, though, Meinzer thinks art shouldn’t take itself too seriously. “That’s a huge thing for me,” they said. “Let’s all get off the high horse… it’s completely fine to make a drawing about a squishy pillow.” I remembered a quote I’d recently read, from painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz’s interview on The Talks magazine, on the struggle of artistic expression and why it’s essential: “The misery of the world has to express itself in the mind of the artist in the form of art — only ever the misery, never anything positive,” Baselitz said. Good things, he believed, would never cause audiences to look.

Meinzer scoffed at that. “I definitely don’t hold onto the idea that you really have to suffer for your art,” they said. “How crudely the Selfies are drawn reflect back to the fact that they are making fun of themselves. Baby Dyke was me completely making fun of my own naivety…but also accepting myself in a sort of quintessential queer coming of age. Baby Dyke and Lady Darling… they’re a complete spectacle. They’re in their world being ridiculous and dramatic, and that’s great.”  

Meinzer isn’t as concerned about giving pretext for their work, or the biographical elements that inspired them to make the piece. These facts naturally come out through the piece; the open-ended nature of interpretation, and the possibility of an unexpected reaction, is more interesting to Meinzer. They aren’t as fixated on what’s authentic and what’s a construct, or having art serve as an emotional compartmentalizer in their “dust bunny” of a brain. Baby Dyke and Lady Darling are just hanging out, they said. The piece isn’t about when they’re going to grow up. It isn’t about having two genders. It’s about the intentionality and paradox of having two separate beings in one body that complement each other. 

“What would you say is the purpose of these objects, then?” I asked. 

Meinzer replied, simply, “They help me understand myself.”

Sofía Trujillo

Feature by Claire Killian

Photos by Anushka Khetawat

She may not have realized it, but in her black turtleneck and leather jacket, Sofía Trujillo looked every bit like the writer I had imagined. With my hair pragmatically pulled back and my notebook and pen in hand, I probably looked exactly like the interviewer I was playing at, too. I had suggested we meet in Butler to chat, which she countered with the Hungarian Pastry Shop – an infinitely better choice given the shop’s ambiance, and its deep roots of literary history. We both waved to friendly faces (a few we had in common!) as we shuffled awkwardly past the tight tables, to the back, and sat down. I was waiting for my first almond horn of the season, and she had a hot chocolate coming. 

Sofía, a Barnard junior, has a command over language and a way of painting with words that feels all-consuming (and frankly, extremely intimidating. I mean, how am I supposed to write an article about a writer?). Reading Sofia’s work is a sensory experience. She writes with an abundance of scenery and description, both abstract and tangible, that does more than just help you visualize the narrative, but allows you to actually live within it. On explaining my experience reading her work, Sofía seemed a bit surprised, explaining that she just “get[s] really heavy handed.” Sofía elaborated that some of her influences include “David Foster Wallace and some Virginia Woolf, but especially the latter:  I think most Virginia Woolf came after being told, ‘oh, I feel like you write like this.’ I already had established my voice, and realized ‘I also have really long sentences with a lot of adjectives’ so in school my parents, my teachers, would repeatedly make comments on my papers. One of my teachers called my sentences baroque.” As an art history student, I jumped at that – baroque is, in the best way possible, exactly how I would describe Sofía’s writing, full of simmering tension and tenebrism. Sofía continued, “there's so much to say about every given thing and I want to put everything in a sentence - and give it a color and a sound and a name and what it is about. That is what is exciting about writing to me.”

Undergirding this pathos, and giving Sofía’s writing its potency, is her commitment to writing what she sees and lives. Practically everything she writes is grounded in her own experiences, which she filters through absurdist and satirical lenses, though she cautions that, “I use those words more as adjectives than as a movement,” clarifying that she does not see herself as a Satirist or Absurdist (as proper nouns) but rather someone who plays with elements of those movements. Explaining her relationship with satire, for Sofía, satire is “a way to give an opinion, but also hide behind humor and nonchalance, to say ‘I don't care.’ Which is not always true, you can act like you don't care. You're just making a joke.” Sofía arguably began to develop her affinity for social critique in freshman year. As an international student coming from Argentina, her experience was different from many U.S. natives: “People thought I was cool on the basis of nothing. I remember feeling like I wasn't even required to have a personality because just my experience growing up somewhere else was enough material. I say  ‘I've never been to Chick-fil-A’ and people would freak out.”

Sofia describes herself as being predisposed to holding back her thoughts, never the first to share an opinion nor someone who moves through the world with externalized convictions, something that people have occasionally misinterpreted: “my own hesitancy to say things about social dynamics and silence was interpreted as, ‘okay, it's cool.’ People just fill in the gaps in their brain. I think it was me doing a ground-analysis of the situation. It was also just a lot of fear, and a lot of discomfort. I was really scared to take a stance in general, and I was raised in an environment that sometimes encouraged me to be more fearful of what was new instead of curious. Taking a stance, for me, on anything, literally the smallest thing, felt like losing my ability to maneuver 360° all the time. I was staking my claim with this one particular corner of a discussion, and I didn't like that because I didn't feel like I had enough knowledge to stand behind it. It got to a point where I wanted people to know what I stand for more clearly.” Sofía did not come to writing as a form of self-expression linearly, her path was not as romantic as just “she wrote her way out of it.” It took a mix of therapy and practice - all of which diffuses into her writing to create works so thoroughly observant of the human experience. Reading her work feels like becoming another person altogether, you become so immersed in her world. Sofía’s style reads like the perfect blend between a surgeon and a surrealist - something so profoundly emotive but also deeply precise in its details.

Having heard so much about her writer’s process, I felt compelled to ask Sofía how she contends with questions about originality in her work – some artists seem obsessed with it, while others swat it off as ego-driven and impossible. After thinking for a moment, she replied, “I do think that that's something that every person who is creating something is going to grapple with. Because so much of my work is centered on my human experience, I truly focus on the exceptionality of each person and what they do. That's why I'm not necessarily as concerned with doing something that really makes me feel powerful, and that's hard.” Despite her focus on her own lived experiences, Sofía often writes as a disembodied third-person narrator, finding it to be just as personal but far more rewarding. “​​I'm tired of myself,” she said with a slight, exasperated roll of her eyes. “That's how I was feeling in my whole non-fiction class this semester. I had already, previously, taken another class called ‘What's Your Story.’ So, I had already been writing about myself for so long. I'd already written about my mother; our issues are well parsed out. Every time I would start a sentence with ‘I,’ I felt disgusted. That's kind of when I started writing about all these other things, because it felt like a way to talk about how I see things but not really center myself.” Out of all the brilliant things Sofía said to me at the café that day, this struck me the most. Here is a person who so sincerely experiences the world around her in prose, then uses the skills that she has worked so hard to develop to reflect the world back at itself. It is difficult to properly convey the power of the earnestness present in Sofia’s writing. (although, I suspect, Sofía could probably do it, and do it well). It is both natural and honed, as well as more deeply experiential than could ever be replicated.

On leaving Hungarian, Sofía explained, “when I got here, I never thought that I would have enough work to send it somewhere.” I looked at her, puzzled, and she explained, “I never thought that I would be chosen for someone to ask me questions about what I thought about writing, or that I would have answers.” I told her that I would call it a full-circle moment, for her to go from imagining interviews to participating in them—but for Sofía it is not, nor has it ever been, a circle, but rather a zig-zag of meaningful experiences and serendipitous accidents. Keep your eyes open for her work around campus – though be aware that if you bump into her, you might find yourself in the background of one of her pieces.


Read her work here.

Ava Frisina

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

Ava, a Senior at Columbia College majoring in architecture, brings a touch of nostalgia to her creative endeavors. Hailing from Los Angeles, Ava channels her artistic pursuits through the mediums of  scrapbooking and sculpture, as well as experimenting and reimagining  various uses of materials. Ava has a knack for creating pieces that strike a fine balance between profound familiarity and intimacy, all while maintaining  a strong sense of design and a high level of craftsmanship. During our conversation, Ava told me about her relationship with art and design, her plans for the future, as well as her creative process and the foundational principles that guide her projects. 

I was 10 minutes late to Ava’s room in one of the Special Interest Community (SIC) buildings. She arrived downstairs, saying goodbye to a friend she was with before greeting me excitedly. Her friend jokingly said  “Agh, thanks Ava for letting me interview you for my magazine”, to which I nervously giggled and they comfortably laughed. We introduced ourselves, said bye to her friend, and went up to the fifth floor. On the elevator ride up, Ava and I  immediately began to talk about a range of topics starting with the fact that her SIC is the first visual artist community on campus, and that this was its inaugural year. As we approached her room, our conversation flowed effortlessly, casually getting to know each other while reacting giddily when we had something in common, such as our interest in architecture, both being middle children, and our shared love for her room’s delightful feature – the window that floods her space, adorned with her bike and various knickknacks, in natural sunlight. Our conversation began to flow over to her history and relationship with architecture. At this point, I had to interrupt our conversation to start recording on my phone, almost forgetting the reason that I was there, for this interview. 

Ava started telling me about her journey with architecture and her college experience. Initially, she wasn’t sure about what she wanted to do. Once she realized all the classes she thought were cool were related to architecture, she realized  that was what she wanted to focus on. Her origins as an artist and architect are muddled yet incredibly distinct. Having grown up in Los Angeles, Ava was exposed to a world of creativity, with her parents instilling in her an interest in creativity and design. Her mother, for one, was involved in the costume design industry and crafts  jewelry. Moreover, Ava’s mom possesses the unique ability to create very intentional and aesthetically pleasing spaces, instilling in Ava an eye for finding value in found objects. She fondly recounted her childhood memories of trailing behind her mom as a kid: 

“As a little kid, I would follow her around and pick up little scraps along the way. She's a very fast walker, so when I say follow her around, I literally mean trailing behind her. We really liked thrift stores and bead shops- the wholesale bead shop in downtown LA. I remember all the people who worked there and would give me little baggies of  beads and other materials that they didn't really need anymore. They were all these weird things that should have been thrown out like dead bugs, or broken plastic from a hanger. I would take those and add them to my collection of things.”

While Ava told me stories from her childhood, I imagined a messy-haired blonde girl running behind her mom. A younger Ava, her attention easily swayed by objects that caught her eye, didn’t mind that her curiosity often meant that her mom would quickly walk away. This attention to detail and, more specifically, appreciation of things that are seemingly meaningless, is what Ava learned from her mother. It wasn’t just her mom, however, who shaped Ava’s creative journey. Her dad also had a huge effect on Ava as an artist and creative. Sharing a room her whole life, for a while with her younger brother, Ava decided to take matters into her own hands At the age of 10, Ava built a loft in her room, completely transforming  the space she was forced, grudgingly, to share. She saw, for the first time, how design can alter spaces, and how she can play around with the environments around her. During her story, I began to wonder how physically she built a loft, being that she was only 10 years old. That’s where her father comes into the picture. Ava, with her natural inclination towards sketching, collaborated with her dad, and they built the loft together. 

Ava mentioned The Pocket Universal Principles of Design, a source of inspiration that deepened her  understanding of space and its profound effects on the human experience. To me, she seemed like someone who actively engages with the media she consumes, thinking about everything she reads, watches, and listens to,  in a way that makes sense for herself. It was really refreshing to hear. This innate curiosity and the stimulation she finds in theory and literature serve as a source of inspiration, motivating her  to apply what she learns independently to her designs.. 

This relation between reading and art caught my attention, so I asked Ava about other books that have been significant for her. 

“This is a little book, very serendipitous. My friends visited me in Copenhagen last semester, and they brought me this book they picked on impulse because the cover reminded them of me. I read it and found that everything about it struck a chord with me. The author, Legacy Russel, coined the term Glitch Feminism, and it refers to people who disidentify from the social norms, where you’re queer, a woman, a person of color, neurodivergent, all of these categories fall into a glitch. She turns a glitch, a negative thing in the coding world, into a space you can rip open and build a world within that space. The language she used was so spatial, and I was really drawn to that, so I took what she said quite literally and decided to try to apply it to architecture and design. I try to collect things that are discarded, that are glitches, like furniture or old tires, and put it to use and give it meaning. Most of what I do is trying to make a world in glitch design, especially for women and queer people. 

Ava told me about her perspective as a queer person in the world of design and architecture, as well as highlighting the lack of representation or the mere acknowledgement of the existence of queer people within the field. With her awareness of the diversity in architectural practices around the world, Ava found it intriguing that despite the omnipresence of queer people, their presence remained largely invisible and understood  as a minority. 

“It’s interesting that there hasn't been a queer architecture that's been established yet. So tying it into this idea of archive, I think it's really interesting to build a critical mass of glitch artifacts to see if there's some underlying theme. I want to see what it looks like to have queer designs and glitch designs in one place,” said Ava.

This really resonated with me. We delved further into our shared opinions on design and architecture as areas that are meticulously planned yet often thoughtlessly overlook diverse identities.  Ava pointed out the stark insensitivity in fields such as car design, and how its practices do not  take into account diversity of body types or female anatomy. Ava is truly passionate about how design, space, experience, and identity can be understood together  – which I really enjoyed thinking about –  so I asked her to tell me more about how her identity finds expression in her work. She patiently showed me many of her pieces that lie around her room. From remnants of past assignments she had a special liking for, to plans and plywood of the chair she designed during her study abroad in Copenhagen, her scrapbooks, a pair of black heels she transformed by gluing hair to them, to a stoplight sculpture she created  by tufting thread through a metal grid, and even a surrealist tire rim with air-dried clay filling the holes, each project embodied her identity as an artist and designer.  Her pieces, in my eyes, exemplify the essence of glitch design that captivates her artistic process – an amalgamation of chaos and freedom that defies conventional norms of art and design. 

While I was looking at all her pieces, I asked Ava about how she makes art for herself versus making art for others, especially considering the intimate nature of scrapbooking. I was curious about the complexities artists face when sharing such vulnerabilities. Ava shared how she did not  think of herself as an artist in the past. As a result, everything she created was inherently personal, she would be perfectly  content with it being private, with each piece emerging spontaneously, driven by raw emotion. She told me how she sees art as a repository of feelings and memories. For Ava, scrapbooking, and transforming her emotions into tangible pieces of art, imbues her feelings with significance and validates their existence in the physical world. In a way, scrapbooking is Ava’s  way of attributing value to her emotions, and acknowledging their reality.

Ava began her design-focused Instagram account with the intention of creating a community around art and design. She is skeptical, however, about social media and digital archives, but has come to appreciate their value. Ava has found immense worth in using her new Instagram account to establish a centralized archive for her work. In her exploration of creating art for others, Ava has found it fascinating to see how people react and engage with her pieces. She enthusiastically described how engaging with her audience has been a huge source of genuine enjoyment. Ava gets to see her art from a new perspective, and can now concretely observe the impact it has on individuals by getting active input in her pieces, a dynamic exchange which Ava approaches with an open, curious, and nonjudgmental attitude. 

As graduation approaches for Ava,  her life is open to taking many different paths. Ava shared her plans, which include the possibility of graduate school abroad.  She emphasized, however, the profound enrichment that she has derived from her time in New York, where she has had the ability of experiencing the vibrant art and design community. She contemplates the idea of staying in the city, but is also yearning to travel, a feeling she conceptualizes as a “travel bug”. Ava’s guiding principles appear to be the ongoing quest for spaces in which her creativity can flourish, which allows her to navigate her future with relative ease and can happen anywhere,  so she doesn’t worry too much about where she will end up. 

Eleanor Furness

Feature by Eve Rosenblum

Photos by Lauren Zhou

It was a perfect autumn evening, one of those nights where you forget all your worries in the crispness of the air and the yellow-orange of the leaves. On the patio of Hungarian, as I waited for Eleanor, I caught the eye of a little girl glaring at me and my chocolate cake. “It’s not fair Mama.” She said, “Why hasn’t our food come yet?” The Mom laughed her daughter off, explaining, you have to wait your turn. As I did my best not to start my cake before the girl’s arrived, I kept thinking about her skepticism. I had forgotten there was a world where I too, once, had not understood these rules.

20 minutes later Eleanor arrived, distinguishing herself from the chichi crowd of the Upper West with cropped bangs and black joggers. A senior, majoring in cognitive science, she transferred two years ago from Scripps College in Southern California, having started to go crazy from the lack of seasons and fog.

Fog, I learned, is big for Eleanor. She grew up admiring these misty weather systems roll through her family’s home in Northern California. A love of nature was also inculcated through the “weird progressive” lower school she went to. The day was largely spent playing outside, in Eleanor’s case, digging in the dirt. 

She explained how it shaped her personal philosophy or lack thereof. For Eleanor, there was no need to question why we do things.

“When you’re just playing in the dirt all day, or building stuff with your hands or playing games or planting lettuce the meaning becomes so self evident. It's not even a question.”

Our disconnect from nature also blinds us from our position in a larger framework of relations, she explained. A more accurate and whole world view would involve non-human entities as well. “There's just so much we can learn from animals or even just properties of objects too, and their relationship to each other, in our relationship to them.” 

She points to the table we’re sitting at. “This table is a table. It's useful because we can put things on it, but what else is going on with the table? What's this table’s specific history? What has it been through? What kind of psychic energy does it have? If we flip it around, could it be used as a weird pillow?” The more she learns about the brain in her readings, the more she thinks structuralism could be right. “It's not about the discrete items, but their relation to each other.” 

But a structuralist understanding of the world has only drifted further from the modern consciousness, Eleanor argues. She cites the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In his conception, under neoliberal capitalism comes a “pornographication” or flattening of existence. Everything is made accessible and visible. Mystery is sapped. Rituals disappear. This only serves to further isolate ourselves from others under the guise of individualism.

I asked Eleanor if she’s been able to protect herself from this experience. Away from her home she emphasized the impossibility. “I can't, and I'm sad. I experience a constant sense of alienation.” In New York she feels that the people, things, or animals around us are seen as valuable based on their usefulness to us. “It defeats the purpose of being alive. It's deeply dehumanizing and depressing” she said.

Children, however, intuitively connect to the world. Her mother used to tell her how while examining her Barbie doll, she discovered eyebrows. To rediscover this curiosity, adults need boredom. “Even now when I'm inconvenienced, obviously, my immediate reaction is annoyance, but then I usually feel grateful, because no, I don't want to be just completing one thing after the other, as quickly as humanly possible. The inconvenience kind of is the point.”

Art can be a practice of inconvenience. Alternating between photography and drawing, Eleanor’s work explores childhood through the younger person as either its subject or its view point. A pencil drawing shows a girl, tears streaming down her cheeks. Loosely sketched toys peak out from beside the toddler: a robot shrouded in darkness on the one side, a hanging bunny on the other. A similar girl appears in a photograph, with a worn out blanket held just before her face. Her mischievous smile and expressionless eyes captivates the viewer's gaze, recalling the confidence and shameless character of their younger self. 

Other photographs depict visual curiosities. A hairless cat on an all-white background. An aquarium, with a string of sea moss reflecting at the surface of the tank, appearing to converge two opposite aquatic worlds for infinity. A colorful anemone, just visible beneath the shadow of the photographer, hair billowing behind them. A maze, three hands exploring its structure, and an older figure, leaning over them, pointing. 

Looking at Eleanor’s work, I forget the focused vision I’ve learned in adulthood. As her photos delight in the curiosity of the younger person’s eye, her sketches demonstrate the different significance of childhood objects. A stuffed bunny might mean fear or comfort to a child, but rarely anything more than a price to an adult. Eleanor’s work provokes the possibility that a return, at least in feeling, is possible. 

But Eleanor emphasizes her art is not for the greater good. On the contrary, art is a personal practice, a means of processing the world, that most of the time, she’s not aware of. “Like, oh my God, I have to do it. I just have to get to a point of being so uncomfortable with myself and pissed off that I just cave and make something.” The art-making itself is rarely fun. In fact, it’s usually a low. “In my opinion, you're gonna feel a little shaky, a little sweaty, a little depleted after, but satisfied. It’s like a good barf.” 

Creating for an assignment, however, the process can go from hard to torturous. “When you're kind of in that middle range of being an artist, there's a lot of feeling like you need to prove yourself, or you're trying to make a statement. Art becomes a kind of discourse, rather than something a little bit more ambiguous or secretive or particular.” This is wrong, she thinks. Art, for her, is not an act of producing but a way of life. If others enjoy her work she would celebrate it, but that doesn’t motivate her to create. “That's not the point,” she said. “And I don’t think it could be the point.”

I asked Eleanor what the point was. She had talked at length about her disgruntlement with the lack of connection in modern society, so the fact that she pursued a solitary practice, such as art, surprised me. Art has taught her how to be alone, she explained. Ironically, this opens you up to deeper and more meaningful connections. Put yourself out there, society suggests. “You might be able to make more friendships, but they're probably not going to be the ones you really want.” 

Through solitude, she has learned how to be with others: truly trying to understand them. “It takes humility and an ability to admit that you may be wrong, but it’s only going to pay off and lead to a more genuine connection.”

This vulnerability Eleanor described reminded me of the girl at the Hungarian sitting next to me only an hour ago, unafraid to look me in the eyes. This vision of connection was possible for our younger selves who acted without hesitancy. Through her pieces, Eleanor turns back time, leaving the rest of us to consider how we will too.

Reach out to Eleanor at ellie.ryann.f@gmail.com.

Jamie Iacovitti

Feature by Nathan Ko

Photos by Adela Schwartz

Jamie Iacovitti is a junior at Columbia College majoring in English with a concentration in East Asian Language and Culture. Jamie’s particularly interested in photography and databending. He also sometimes indulges in writing short stories. His work challenges the audience to acknowledge the existence of different perceptions of the world—perceptions perhaps more radical and colorful than ours. 

My first interaction with Jamie was over email. I got an enthusiastic email from him asking for a time to meet. He generously gave me a list of times that stretched from Monday to Sunday.

At that time, I was bombarded with work. I received a follow-up e-mail from Jamie which I tend to find quite scary. It’s not that they’re rude, but rather I just feel bad that I didn’t get to their e-mail on time. And I felt similarly in this situation. Jamie’s follow-up email, however, wasn’t scary at all. The smiley faces and soothing tone of his email reassured me that Jamie was the type of guy who I would love to talk to.

I first met Jamie in person on the first floor of Shapiro Hall before going to his dorm where we later conducted the interview. We quickly said hi, and I couldn’t help but notice that his loud t-shirt, stained with neon colors, felt reminiscent of his vibrant art. He had effortlessly messy hair that any artist in New York would envy. We head to his room, and I, again, find myself immersed in colors. His room had LED lights running through his walls as many Columbia students have. He also had his own art with its flashes of neon colors, which many Columbia students don’t have. This rush of colors and sensations is something that appears throughout his photos that use databending. Databending is the process of manually corrupting the metadata and code of digital pictures. The result is a sort of unsettling, neon photograph that feels both familiar yet foreign.

I mentioned this sort of rush, and he brought up his own sensory issues. 

“​​I get overwhelmed very easily by certain things. Databending gives me a way to make an audience feel the way I feel, an onrush of sensations they may not feel on a daily basis.”

This feeling of rush is something that also stems from Jamie’s interest in horror. He mentions how one of his favorite games, Silent Hill, is a horror game, and talks about how the genre of horror carries over to his work.

“I think there might be a touch of cosmic primal horror in my work, but it's not explicitly expressed.”

When we think about horror, we often think of being spooked at a haunted house or looking at something really creepy. Yet, for Jamie, horror is more associated with the feeling of engulfment.

“It's more about primal nature, something that unnerves you without being outright scary. Overstimulation plays into that feeling, something you can experience in various aspects of life.”

Jamie’s interest in horror overall stemmed from the release of Coraline, a movie that spooked him as a young kid. He was scared to the point of always keeping the lights on. But, years later, he decided to confront his fear head-on by watching Coraline again, and this time, he was really intrigued by it. Specifically, when watching Coraline, he felt a primal feeling—a type of fear that can be felt deeply on an instinctual level.

It’s not just Coraline that inspired him as an artist. By watching a lot of movies as a kid, Jamie would see these beautiful shots and decide that he could replicate such beauty through photography. As a kid, he would use his Nintendo DSI as his camera. And, later on, he found a video of someone databending, and it reminded him of the y2k aesthetic that he was interested in. After being mesmerized by the process, he reached out to the content creator on how to databend. Surprisingly, the content creator responded to Jamie and gave him a rundown. Ever since that moment, Jamie has been databending.

For Jamie, databending is an interesting tool because it allows him to accomplish a lot of things: he’s able to challenge the audience’s own perceptions of the world by offering a new perception, a manipulated vision that’s eerie—unstable, almost. 

“Everyone has a different perception of the world. The way I see the world is different than how you see the world. This carries over to databending when you’re able to make pictures that look completely different from their original form but still technically the same subject.” 

This idea of destroying our own conceptions of the world is something quite overt in Jamie’s work. In Jamie’s piece “cuore,” which has the words “DESTROY THE WORLD” all in capital, he mentions how he aimed to destroy our own perceived ideas of the world through databending. Essentially, Jamie’s trying to show a radical reimagining of a photo of reality to prove the existence of different views of the world.

Cuore

This idea was not something Jamie thought of overnight but rather came through watching anime. One of his main inspirations in art is the anime Serial Experiments Lain which comments on the instability of the way we view the world. That certainly carries over to his idea of destroying our own perceptions of reality. He’s also inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion. That anime, for Jamie, explored the idea of how others view us differently from how we view ourselves, which enticed him. 

This repeating theme of the instability of our perceptions isn’t something only unique to Jamie’s visual artworks. Jamie’s an English major, and he often explores the theme of perception through creative writing.

“A lot of things I write are about perspective or about the internal flawed thinking. Most of the things I write about are people learning that what they're perceiving is just not accurate. A lot of things I write, like the perspectives and points of view, are all jumbled up and messed up, and you have to kind of figure out what’s happening. In the same way, when you look at a picture of mine, you’re asking yourself what the original subject may be.”

In that way, writing and photography have overlaps in Jamie’s interests. However, in creative processes, they’re quite different. While Jamie describes writing to be all his effort, he says that photography that involves databending is different.

In a way, databending is somewhat of a blind process. During the process of databending, Jamie’s unable to see what he’s really doing to the pictures. He’s just corrupting the metadata and code; hence, the visuals are determined by random chance. He mentions how this allows some sort of higher power to offer their finishing touches on his photos.

While Jamie’s not strictly religious, he mentions that his Catholic childhood makes him more of a spiritual person. He describes how that carries over to his art.

“In Catholicism, there's this feeling of God's presence all around. I think there's some truth to that, as there's an external force moving the universe. Databending allows that force to take over. You can't physically see the changes you make to the picture. It's like pressing random buttons and letting chaos or whatever force you believe in, interact with the photo. If the outcome is appealing, great. If not, you restart and let the universe work its magic. I'd say it's about 50% me and 50% the universe. I take the initial picture and then let the universe take the reins after pressing those random buttons.”

In the process of pressing those buttons to digitally manipulate his photos, Jamie’s actively exploring a contradiction. Jamie mentions how his work explores the chaos that emerges from the binary of the concrete and the digital—the photographs of the world he takes and the digital databending of them. He’s particularly interested in this binary even though it may seem contradictory at times.

“The universe works in contradiction, so having a more physical medium like photography and converting it digitally and making the digital part of it a big part of the process is just something I find very beautiful.”

Jamie’s emphasis on contradiction reminded me of the way John Keats described Shakespeare—the way in which he possessed “negative capability.” And by negative capability, Keats means the ability of an artist to explore contradictions and uncertainties without reaching a clear conclusion. It seemed like Jamie was not bugged by and perhaps rather comfortable with this murky, contradictory space. The contradictory space of taking his own photos of the world and having the universe manipulate them.

But, in a way, his comfortability with digitally manipulating his photos makes sense given his STEM background. Jamie used to be a student in the engineering school before he transferred to Columbia College and became an English major. Hence, he finds the digital process to be a comfortable medium to explore his art.

When Jamie brought this up, I was shocked, since there are very few students I know who transfer from one undergraduate college to another at Columbia, and the shift from STEM to English felt very abrupt for me. Jamie mentioned how he had a severe car accident in 2021 that shifted the way he viewed life. In a way, it was a memento mori incident, a moment that reminded him of the inevitability of death.

“I thought, ‘I'd rather die happy than be depressed.’ It shifted my perspective and made me realize I don't have to conform to a life that doesn't bring me joy. It allowed me to choose to live a happy life, and that was the most significant change to stem from the accident.”

Such an accident not only propelled him to study English but also fueled him to start making art. 

“Perhaps a little while after the car accident, I felt the urge to pursue art further, something I always wanted to do but lacked the determination until then.”

As he quickly decided to do art, he started to make art without any training. 

“It's all self-taught. I haven't received any formal art training, not even in writing. My writing 'training' was in English class.” He mentions that trial and error and learning through the love of the craft is what allowed him to produce art on a higher level.

During the interview, I remember being impressed by Jamie’s self-urgency to create art, especially without training. I noted how it must have taken a lot of self-confidence, and Jamie mentioned how he used to be an anxious kid without any self-esteem. He brought up how his friend Soph from Cincinnati, Ohio was someone who brought out his confidence, which allowed him to pursue art. 

And with this confidence, Jamie’s able to perhaps explore more art forms as well. While Jamie doesn’t have any set plans for the future, he did tell me that he has a budding interest in pursuing music, which just like photography and writing, he’s willing to learn by himself. 

“Art has visual, written, and musical aspects. Music seems like the third major one. Maybe I can call myself an artist within these realms.”

The process of being self-taught is something that impacted all his artistic processes. Hence, in a way, Jamie feels that making art for him almost depends on being self-taught.

Teaching myself makes the process of making art more personal. And I think because I was self-taught, I take the pictures that I take and write the stories that I write. It’s a very internal process of learning and the style of art that comes out of it becomes more personal.”

To find more of Jamie’s art, you can access his Instagram. 

Hart Hallos

Feature by Phoebe Klebahn

Photos by Mori Liu, assisted by Grace Schleck and Emily Chmiel

Hart Hallos is a senior in Columbia College studying Visual Arts. Hart’s artistic practice centers around exploring themes such as queerness, humor, power, delusion, trashiness, filth, and the language of emails. When asked to describe their artistic practice,  Hart compares their relationship with art to joyfully chasing a butterfly through a field… and then tripping in a hole and breaking their ankle.

When I arrived at Hart's home I was greeted warmly. They invited me to sit down at the table in the quaint tableau of an Italian restaurant that Hart and their roommate had constructed against one of their living room walls. Hart struck me immediately as warm, welcoming, witty and carefree, and I was fascinated by the spacious, artistic, and intentional feel of their standard Columbia studio double. On the walls of the living room is an eclectic display of Hart’s art, as well as trinkets, baubles, pieces of quilt, and one of Hart’s old halloween costumes. 

After properly admiring the walls and decorations, we talked for almost an hour about Hart’s life, academic and artistic journey, and their plans as a soon-to-be graduate.

Hart recently returned from a semester off, and told me a bit about how their time away from Columbia has influenced their ideal post graduate life.

“I do not think that when I get out of school making art will pay my bills, and that is fine by me. I took a semester off—which is why I have this shifted schedule and will be graduating in December—and I just worked at an ice cream store and paid my bills. And then this summer I worked at a food truck and paid my bills that way. And that's the current plan—to go back and do that and try to make art on my own time. I definitely do not have an expectation that art will support me at this point in time.”

Hart was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky and they are absolutely thrilled to be moving back home this Spring. 

“I feel like Kentucky is a way easier place for me to make stuff than New York is, which is something that took me a bit to realize. I find Lexington and the people I meet there very inspiring. The older artists in my life, who have somehow finagled their way into being supported financially by what they do, have told me to find the place first and then let the art follow from there.”

The presentation of queerness is an integral part of Hart’s artistic expression. Hart acknowledged that outsiders often perceive their love of their Southern hometown as being at odds with their queerness – but Hart doesn’t see it that way.

“So many of my social interactions freshman year were me, presenting as a very visible queer person, being like, ‘I'm from Kentucky.’ And people being like, ‘oh no!’ And for the first bit of college, I would be like, ‘Yeah, haha, it kind of sucks.’ But now I really try to be like, ‘Actually, Kentucky's awesome!’ I try to counter people's expectations, because people have that reaction a lot. But there are queer people in Kentucky. I promise. Everywhere! I'm interested in the lives of queer people in Kentucky. That is currently what a lot of my work is based around, so where better to do that than to be a queer person in Kentucky?”

The ceramic wall fountain Hart submitted as a part of their portfolio specifically speaks to these experiences. Last semester, many states, including Kentucky, explicitly banned gender affirming care for minors. Though the veto was overridden, this debate surrounding gender and gender affirming care caused Hart to examine and reflect on how gender and sexuality are publicly portrayed and commodified.

“I was just so viscerally upset by that and the idea of this place where all these really marginalized, vulnerable queer people exist being something that is able to be commodified and in such a direct way. I was just thinking about places that I'm familiar with, where queer people are still in those marginalized realms and where they still are trying to figure out ways to define themselves in opposition to how they're defined by institutions.”

Another moment Hart specifically mentioned as being integral to their artistic reflection on gender and queerness was when they discovered that Grindr had gone public on the New York Stock exchange.

“So for the ceramic piece, I was just thinking about all those things, and I was like, “I really want to make a piece about what it's like to be a gender non conforming individual from Kentucky'', and the existences of trans people in the South. And specifically trans people who aren't ready to be displayed at the New York Stock Exchange as an example of a perfectly ‘moral’ and ‘consumable’ and ‘flawless’ trans person who could run for president—like people who have all these bad behaviors and that are self destructive or unkind or whatever. To me that's a much more productive form of representation. And so that's what that piece was about. All those faces were based on different kinds of characters that I had imagined of Trans people who would be the last people to ever be on the face of a Capital One campaign. My ceramics professor was using the term ‘Grumsy’' at the time to describe ceramics—like how some things are just kind of gritty and they're not formed very perfectly or gracefully—and I was taking that term and applying it to identities and, I was like, ‘where are the grumsy queer people and how can I showcase their stories?’ Cause that's what I feel like I am.”

The ceramic piece was presented along with a performative element. Despite Hart's identification as a performance artist, they do not create art with the performance in mind.“I need an artistic idea, and then it's just like, ‘ell, it has to be performed, I guess.’” Hart views the performance process as challenging, stating that they “have to go lay down in a dark room” after, so they do not have an interest in making performance their main medium.

Hart spoke passionately about the influence that living in New York has had on their artistic process and development. Living in New York has made them want to run away from the city many times, and Hart constantly questions how much influence the city has on them versus the Columbia environment.

“I find it [being in the city] can be very distracting at the same time as it's very exciting because there's so much activity and there's so many things you find yourself wanting to do. I just find myself feeling very lost and confused a lot of the time here, and not feeling like I have the time to think or get closer to myself, like I can do in Kentucky. It's a time thing. It's like a space thing.”

“I surround myself with people who have similar qualms with the lifestyle of the city, and I try to use my work to be honest and call attention to this struggle..”

At Columbia, Hart works hard to cultivate comfortable physical and emotional spaces. Recently, they’ve been decorating their room, as well as their studio, noting their desire to “transform” the space into something unrecognizable as a standardized unit of Columbia property. Their walls are covered in fake brick wall paper, prints, sewing patterns, hanging objects and items of clothing. Every surface is filled with salvaged trinkets, that would put the most seasoned flea market goers in a state of awe.

After attending an arts magnet highschool, Hart felt burnt out coming into college. They hadn’t expected to get involved in Columbia’s art scene, but after they took their first studio drawings class they changed their mind. Hart joked that when they started down the visual arts path they felt pressure to complete both a visual arts and art history double major “in a desperate preprofessional move,” adding that once they began to work through their major classes, their longtime love of art \ became stressful and complicated. 

“I think some of my most positive experiences taking art classes were the very first ones I took when I didn’t know if it was something I was going to necessarily major in, but that I did because it felt really good. Once you commit to the major, you're like, I should probably do a good job at the thing that I major in at the very least. And that, for me, added a ton of pressure and was part of the reason why I took time off between my junior and senior years, because I had to figure out a way to not have that all. I was basically only able to make stuff in sort of manic spurts. I look back at the work that I made during that time, and some of it I still feel a connection to, but I'm not sure who I was when I made some of it and I now know that I needed to figure out a way to be able to be thoughtful and spend time on my art without it being a torturous experience. There's definitely something at Columbia where it's like, if you're going to choose to do something, you must be exceptional at it.”

“It's an assertion of confidence to even be like, I major in this, and I feel good enough at this to make this the main thing I do in college, but then you're also supposed to be so good at it that you're able to immediately get a job in a field where there are truly no jobs for people graduating college, except for doing spreadsheets at a gallery, which is the very last thing I want to do.”

In terms of how they combat these pressures, Hart discussed  focusing on “being a true beginner in something. I really like taking classes in stuff that I don't have experience in. There's something very comforting to me about being in that stage and not having some of the expectations that I really easily put on myself thrown at me just yet.”

As a second semester senior, Hart is beginning to plan their thesis project, and mentioned that they want to use the project to examine the concept of delusional confidence and what drives them to create art.

“The idea I have is a series of talking sculptures. They would do speeches about what's the best bathroom in the Watson studio building to have sex in with a stranger. Or I have an idea for a speech that's like, “Why I should never be marked late to class” that's about the fact that I have to figure out what my gender identity is every time I get ready in the morning and that’s hard, and so I should never be marked tardy ever. I want to do things that are intentionally ridiculous, but  also honest. There are definitely aspects of existing that are absolutely fucking ridiculous, and I think I am really attracted to that delusion– people who have this sense of unshakeable purpose and confidence in themselves and what they do, because I don't have that whatsoever and so I'm fascinated by it.”

Who Loves The Sun?

“So I do want that feeling of confidence while also recognizing that it's delusional. I think creating stuff is a very nice place for me to explore a side of myself that I feel is typically very contained. I've been trying to figure out why I would  ever make anything—what gives me the right to think that I should make anything when there's already 30,000 objects here? What gives me the right to add one more to the pile of objects that exist in the world? But I also think that's a question that, if you're thinking of it all the time, you'll never make anything, and when I don't make anything I'm really sad. You have to have some delusion about the necessariness of what you're doing to do anything at all, so why not embrace that sense of delusion?”

For more information about Hart and their work, follow them on Instagram at @_horse_friend25_. 

Linnea Hopkins-Ekdahl

Feature by Sayuri Govender

Photos by Jade Li

Linnea Hopkins-Ekdahl is a multimedia artist at Columbia. She works to capture the beauty of the mundane aspects of life through film photography, screenwriting and filmmaking, traditional and digital painting, collage, and print. I talked to her about renouncing perfectionism, the process of finishing a piece, fan culture, and future plans for her art.

I met Linnea Hopkins-Ekdahl in the lobby of East Campus, experiencing the slight shame of being a Barnard student and waiting to get swiped in. Luckily, her immediate warmth curbed any sense of embarrassment. Linnea’s love and warmth extends into the art she creates, in which she captures her close friends, her favorite objects, and cherished memories. As a multimedia artist, her work takes on numerous shapes and forms. Because of this, Linnea has unlearned the need for perfectionism as mastery. She instead focuses on what makes her most passionate–whether that be her newfound love of weekly collages or honing her filmmaking and screenwriting skills for her future career. 

Bone Church

Her apartment, shared with her friends, was filled with Linnea’s art–from portraits to still lifes to film photography. Her art shared a space with vibrant print collages and ceiling-high movie posters, creating a colorful and inspired space. In the kitchen, Linnea pushed a rainbow beaded curtain aside, offering me some tea left behind by a friend from England. On the dining room table lay black and white film prints of her roomate taken by the ferris wheel at Coney Island. When I asked Linnea about her inclination towards depicting her friends in her art, she smiled, saying “I’m so happy to be able to portray them. For these photos, someone else might be like “that's cool I guess” but I see it as “oh my god that was such a fun day at Coney Island!” Whether a picture of a day at Coney Island or a painting of a moment of quiet studying, Linnea is fascinated by the mundanity of life. Her current project is her weekly collage, made up of the wonders and scraps of the week. “I collect a bunch of stuff that most people would think is trash, but I choose very carefully. My memory is not great sometimes, and it's so easy to forget what happened. I’m super interested in the process of recording my life and others’ and those small stories that you would otherwise forget about.” As we talked, she quietly took the sticker label off a discarded pound cake wrapper that would later find its place in her collage. “It's also really nice to have a private practice for yourself,” she added, “and collages are helping me let go of perfection.”

We discussed her short films, one made in her sophomore year and one during her junior year study abroad in Prague. The latter was shot fully on film–an arduous but rewarding process. “The process of shooting on film itself is so intense. You only have 2-3 rolls of film, so you can't do as many takes as you can shooting on digital. With film, sometimes you get just one take.” Her first short film–funded by Columbia University Film Productions in 2022–is currently removed from Youtube so she can re-edit and re-work it. “It was my first time writing a script and my first time doing literally anything film related” she explained, “so I was trying to teach myself while pretending I knew everything for my crew.” Her film, which followed two people trying to figure out if they were on a date or not, struck a chord in many viewers. “It wasn’t based on my life, but a lot of people said it was relatable, which was great–it shows the truth in it!” Her next steps for filmmaking would be “Writing a feature. I wouldn't make it right now, but it would be an ongoing process extending beyond graduation. I definitely want to work to improve my script writing.” 

Linnea further expressed how she recently shed the idea of striving for perfection and mastery. “Since I work with so many mediums and have so many interests, it's impossible to get really good at one thing,” she mused, adding how “I spoke to a filmmaker over the summer who identified as a multimedia artist, even though they primarily focus on film. I asked them, "Where do you find the time to master all the different skills you need to do this?" And they said, "well just the word ‘master’ itself has a deeply problematic history" which is so true. It made me realize I don't want to master anything or aim for constant perfection. I can leave the unfinished behind me!” By renouncing the idea of perfection, Linnea is able to work in many mediums at once, as well as let projects breathe and have time between when she first works on them to when she finishes them.  

Zoe

This practice of returning to a piece of art extends beyond Linnea’s films. Her process for painting maintains a dedicated attention to detail.  She told me how a painting of a friend was currently sitting downstairs, and is “in danger of me repainting it. I'm itching to get my hands on it, but I don't want to ruin it.” I asked her how she knew a painting was done or if any of her work ever felt truly finished. “It depends on when I’m satisfied,” she explained, “some are unfinished and I don’t feel the desire to finish it, but I know it could come later. Some are done because the varnish is on it. But, the thing I like the most about painting, especially oil paints, is that you can work it over and over and over again. I don't believe in mistakes while painting.” 

Besides my love for Linnea’s portraits, I was captivated by a piece of her Captain America collection–a play on the “Cabinet of Curiosities” trope with a heartfelt but fan-oriented subject. When I asked her about it, she told me how “I believe in having fun with things. But even though it is a silly subject matter, fan culture is a thing that's taken very seriously. It's something that can get people through dark places, and also let people express things they might not usually be able to explore.” Linnea’s interest in fan culture comes from her own participation. We talked about shared experiences with fandom, especially the artistic output of fandom. When I asked her about the process of creating fanart versus traditional works, she stopped me to address the stigmas around fanart. “I think that idea of ‘progress’ is super interesting,” she started, “it brings up the concept of high and low art and what is overall considered art. Fanart is considered low art that you move on from and replace with high art–but so many great works are fanart or fanfiction. I mean, Good Omens is like Bible fanfiction, Dante’s Inferno is his fanfiction, and some pop art is fanart. I have read so many beautiful works of fanfiction, and seen so many beautiful works of fanart–better than some contemporary art I’ve seen.” 

Cabinet of Curiosities

Fandom still holds a place in Linnea’s work today. Leaned against her bedroom window is a pair of two-toned vibrant screen printed images of Bucky Barnes, along with numerous postcards, film photographs, and paintings from her favorite artists. It tells a story of her time at Columbia with her friends–memorialized in printed photos, the skills passed down to her from her family, and the art that continues to inspire her today. On her shelf were two film cameras: her grandfather’s old film camera and her father’s Nikon from the 90s that she's used for years. “I love old cameras and seeing if I can get them to work,” she explained. It was clear that family played a significant role in her life, as Linnea also mentioned how her grandmother went to art school before becoming a nurse, musing how “I feel like creativity is in my blood”. 

In five years time, Linnea is unsure where she will be, but is hopeful about her future. “I’m trying to figure out what balance of things I want to create for myself. So many people fall into their jobs or have job titles that they wouldn't have known existed in the past. There could be something out there that I don’t even know exists now! So hopefully, I will find whatever my niche is in New York. And maybe have a dog.” In terms of being a multimedia artist, Linnea expressed her desire to find a deeper connection between the mediums she works in. “I definitely want to connect my work more. I think that's what I'm turning towards now–collage and mixed media animation where the technique is more physical. With animation, I can combine my enjoyment of collage, painting and film.” 

Canterbury 3

Linnea’s art transcends typical notions of mastery and tradition in favor of depicting the things she cherishes the most. As her work finds homes in new and old mediums, she beautifully captures the familiar, the beloved, and the wonders of the mundane. 

Margaery