Feature by Cathleen Luo
Photos by Kendall Bartel
Production Assistants: Eva Abrego, Sungyoon Lim, Cas Sommer
BTS Video: Mackenzie Turner
Macy Sinreich is a sophomore transfer at Columbia College, studying Visual Arts. She explores ways to continuously experiment with multimedia in her art and uses surrealist imagery to express her inner world.
I meet with Macy on a busy Wednesday, mid-week, mid-semester, on one of the first chilly days of fall. We sit at one of the ramp tables of Lerner, watching students scurry in and out of the building, running to classes and chatting with friends. As our conversation explores her experience transferring from Pratt and themes of independence and loneliness in her art, we observe the constant state of transition around us—which college has been for Macy and the rest of us.
Macy’s work is youthful and yearning, dreamy in a way that understands what it’s like to be trapped in one’s head. As a multimedia artist dabbling in acrylics, graphite, and watercolor, she draws inspiration from personal experiences, specifically about growing comfortable with her own loneliness and solitude. Coming out of the pandemic as a high schooler, Macy’s art directly speaks to her experience during isolation.
Cloud Fellows
She explains that her two pieces in the series “Sky Fellows” mark the beginning and end of her senior year. The first of the series depicts three giantesses among the clouds, occupying a contemplative space. Macy describes the fuel for its creation as “just feeling kind of lost” at the beginning of her last year of high school. She found solace in painting these purple figures in the sky, away from the stressors of reality. In the second piece of the series, made at the end of the school year, Macy says: “I wanted to cap off the year in a more uplifting place but still talked to the Sky theme, so I chose sunset as opposed to a cloudy sky.” These surrealist pieces reflect the meditative and spacey mindset of the artist at the time. These pieces can both be considered literal self-portraits, as the figures are based on Macy’s own physical image, they are also self portraits of her inner world at the time, telling us more than what’s on the surface.
Sky Fellows 2
When asked about self-portraiture, Macy finds that much of her work ends up unintentionally being both a symbolic and literal self-portrait. Young painters, like Macy, often don’t have easy access to models so they rely on photos taken of themselves to create references for poses. This occurs in “Sky Fellows” as well as her other pieces “Self Reflection” and “Who What Where When Why?”
Who What Where When Why?
In “Self Reflection,” she plays with traditional still life drawing by placing herself within the work, her face seen through the reflections between the glass cups and pitchers. “Who What Where When Why?” is another direct self-portrait, this time playing with the idea of social media. The painting looks as if it could’ve been found while scrolling through Instagram; the blue arrows are fun, quirky edits on a casual selfie. With the self-portrait donning iconic flame-shaped sunglasses, a sense of 20-something youth and moody self-reflection comes through.
Self Reflection
This sort of ultra-contemporality struck me when I first saw Macy’s work. When asked about her intentions with this youthful energy, she responds, thoughtfully: “I never realized that I might be perceived as youthful. But I guess that makes sense since I am a young person painting the things that I see in my life.” In her other pieces, there are chocolates, lighters, Dr. Martens, lipstick, and Nike sneakers. The clothing items and accessories which so frequently show up in her paintings exemplify Macy’s love of fashion. She says, “Through these items from my everyday, I can symbolically represent feelings or periods in my life.”
Nike
Chocolate
Some of her other pieces are more surrealist and absurd. Macy explains that “[Surrealism is] a good way to represent vulnerable feelings without making it so explicit. I don't necessarily want to make art that's directly telling you I am sad. I want to make art that's nuanced, subtle, and open to interpretation. And maybe that also has something to do with me not wanting to talk about things directly.” This surrealist absurdity can be seen in her pieces “Joy Ride,” “Time,” and “Wealth,” which have seemingly random items scattered around in the painting, like turkey dinners, cars, and geodes, as well as moments of architecture referencing classic Surrealist painters like Giorgio de Chirico.
Wealth
Joy Ride
Macy’s favorite piece so far is “My Year as a Transplant,” a very personal mapping of her experiences as a freshman at Pratt. She describes the piece as a sort of memorial to her first year at college in watercolor and ink mixed media. The piece reflects the feeling of having a dream— the inability to connect all the fragments of narratives and scenes that are constantly shifting and just out of reach. In the piece, she draws borders around dream scenes of her everyday college life, and then breaks through the borders she created. She includes little city iconography at the bottom, rats and metrocards, a homage to her experience adjusting to New York.
My Year As A Transplant
Macy and I dissect each section of the piece together. The top right fragment replicates the feeling of being overwhelmed with “falling into a black hole.” The Dr. Marten boots in the puddle are shoes that fit into Macy’s fashion taste, and one scene shows her stepping into a puddle and causing rings to ripple out, along with the word “Home?” She explains that she added this word because: “I started calling New York ‘home’ when I went home to visit Ohio for Thanksgiving with my parents.” This questioning of where she actually belonged and felt comfortable became a big focus of her work in her first year. Other fragments include commentary on feeling overwhelmed by academics, symbolized by the computer, her decorated wall in college, and a scene of her laying in bed and spacing out. The recurring spiral motifs reflect the feeling of spinning in circles without direction.
Time
Macy’s art reflects a place of transition that many of us can understand: the distraction, turbulence, restlessness, but also joy of figuring out college. As a transfer student, Macy is now majoring in visual arts and taking her first drawing class at Columbia. In class, she hopes to take “little bits and pieces of things from museums or libraries and daily life to make art with.” She says: “I'm a lot happier here, but it feels very much like I have a lot of momentum. And I just can't slow down. I think I'm finally breaking into a more conceptual space and loosening up and stylistically expanding.”
You can find Macy’s work on her website and instagram:
website: https://sites.google.com/view/macysinreich/fine-art
instagram: @maybe.macy.s