Richard Lee

Feature by Claire Killian

Photo by Haley Cao

You say that you didn't really start identifying as an artist until recently, you considered yourself more of an engineer. With that transition, you talk about there being an overlap between the two. Can you speak to the dynamic between those two identities? 

To be honest, I didn't really even consider myself an engineer for a while, because I was still very much seeking to understand the mechanisms behind whatever we're building. But that aspect of building is what drew me to engineering in the first place. That is what really falls into art as well. What took me so long to consider myself an artist/fall into the process of making art was the process of making, I never really felt like I was creating something new. And because I was so into photography, for a while, it felt like I was capturing something instead of positing into existence, but there's an overlap in my eyes, because a lot of the process is just making something exist. It's like, this is something that is observable, it's something that is a feeling, it's something that is something that is an idea. How can we actually construct it and show it and share it?

In addition to art and engineering, there's a third component to your work - you're in an acapella group! Music factors into what you do very heavily. How does that add to the dichotomy between art and engineering?

Music has been there for me since day one. Growing up I didn't really have artists in the family. My mom was a literature professor, and my dad does engineering work. They're immigrants, so they never really assimilated with American pop culture, but pop culture was what drew us together. Music, movies, all that stuff was what drew conversations between all of us, which, going back to music, was something that was unspoken but it could be spoken, just a way of creating fluid conversation for us. For me, music has been that through-line where it can both be nonverbal and a verbal expression of how we're feeling. That honestly ends up being a lot of the motivation behind a lot of my work. A lot of my drawings are made by listening to something and I'm trying to process exactly what's going on. But it manifests in a visual way. Photography wise, I started using cameras, because I was going to concerts and taking photos for artists. Slowly I realized that it was detracting from the experience. So eventually I was like, ‘let me put it away.’ But it's how I trained my eye in a live setting. As for a capella right now, I've been in it for all of college so far, and it's just been a huge community for me. It has also constantly embedded me in this acoustic world of singing with my friends. That feeling of blending is really powerful, but has also shown me the power of our own voices and expressing what's going on.

When you have a camera in your hands, and you're in any sort of environment, whether it's a concert, or you're out for a walk, what is the catalyst that makes you lift the camera up to take a picture? What are you looking for at that moment?

For me, it's not really conscious. It's a very knee-jerk reaction, where I see something that kind of sticks and I need it to stick, so I pick up a camera and go for it.That style changes a lot depending on what type of camera I'm using. I'm sure all of us were like this, but growing up with phones, the first camera I ever picked up was an iPod Touch, and that's how I got started. Moving into college, I got really into film, and film felt a little bit more intentional because it was like, ‘I only have 20 shots and I'm here with my friends, and I brought my camera with me so I'm gonna take a few pictures here and there.’ It's definitely a feeling of capturing a moment for me - we're so caught up in the flow of everything that photography, for me, is like taking a step back and thinking ‘alright, this is a little scene or a little frame of my life movie that I'm trying to capture.’ 

You talk about using a ton of different mediums. Obviously there's photography, and then within photography, there's film, there's iPod cameras, there's everything. However, you also write about VR simulations and music visualizers. What are those?

Those were interests that came to me during COVID. We couldn't go to concerts, movie theaters were shut down, and I had always looked forward to those little, real-time environments. In those places I always felt like, ‘I'm sitting in a room. I'm listening to music. I'm watching a movie.’ I felt very present in those spaces. I tried to look into ways of replicating that in a remote setting, and that ended up falling into virtual reality and music visualizers. V.R. was actually pretty embedded in a research project that I've been working on since freshman year. It's been a four-phase study, where every year we take in hundreds of people who come into the lab and play a video game. It was actually a simulation of Apollo 13, where three different people are trying to get back to Earth in time because their spaceship’s dismantling. They each control a different part of the spaceship and they have to coordinate. I've been running that experiment, and I built the environment to simulate it. It gave me a lens for digital architecture. There's so much talk about the Metaverse these days, and how it's going to reshape how we work with each other, and how we interact with environments - that environment is entirely constructed in virtual space. It's man made, but it's also electronic, and it doesn't feel necessarily authentic, but it's supposed to. What drove me was this question of, ‘how can we create those spaces that feel real even though they’re virtual?’ Then with music visualizer, literally through all of middle school and high school I would just go to concerts all the time. I was really big into EDM and electronic music. A lot of the artists that I saw would put on live shows and they'd be out there with synthesizers and their keyboards, but in the background there would be a huge light show. It was so beautiful, and it added so much to the musical experience, that I spent a lot of time learning how to code visualizers and worked with some friends on designing interfaces with them. It’s definitely an interest of mine. 

Just listening to you talk, it sounds like space and community is so central to what you do, whether it’s talking about going to a concert and wanting to capture a moment, or being in a space and seeing this amazing light show, going on or even just trying to construct a virtual space. When someone interacts with a piece of art that you've made, if they're looking at it or they're literally experiencing it, what sort of experience do you want them to have? Do you want them to come away with anything? Do you want them to feel any particular way?

What made me fall in love with concerts and those shared spaces was that feeling of communal empathy, the feeling of, ‘I'm a part of a group of people that are all immersing ourselves in what this feels like, and running with it and flowing with it.’ One big piece of what I would look for in someone trying to experience my art, per se, would be perspective - what do you see in this work? And yourself? And what is being reciprocated? What might you see in an artist's work when you're doing that? Because we go to concerts, and we hear people sing deeply personal things, and you resonate with them. We flow, and we dance, and we sing along. It's them sharing and us sharing back, it's a constant transfer of energy and light. I would hope that by sharing our own works we also share insight, that level of mutual understanding or introspection.

Your work is predominantly digital, it’s largely based in engineering, and so much of it is about the give and take between people in those high energy spaces, like a concert. Then there's one set of pieces that are so much more analog, that are cerebral and introspective, and more focused on you. Those are the doodles! I'm really curious to hear from you about them, because, at least to me, they're so different conceptually from all of your other work.

For the longest time, a lot of my work was trying to capture an environment. Photography is taking a picture of something moving in space and time. But for my doodles, it started with me just dozing off in class. For real! It was because of Zoom, to be honest, I would just be on my iPad and taking notes, but it's impossible to pay attention for that long. The doodles for me are a lot of real time processing. None of them really took more than an hour, even just five, ten, minutes sometimes. They're very fluid, and they're just about, ‘what am I observing right now? What am I feeling in real time?’ In some ways it's a little bit more introspective, as you said, because it's just me with a pen and paper, and nothing on this blank canvas is pointing me in any direction, but I'm hearing things. I have peripheral feelings that are still lingering, and it's like, ‘alright, how do we put it there?’ No one's grabbing the pencil and doing it with me. It really just is me at a desk, or laying on my bed, having fun.

Is that sort of experience very different from your creative process when you're doing something different, whether it's photography, constructing a digital space, working on a VR simulation or a synthesizer?

Generally my work focuses on creating something that involves other people. A lot of my photography involved me picking up a camera and taking a picture of something that I want to capture myself. Recently I've gotten really into portrait photography. The act of taking a picture of someone inherently calls for taking on their perspective, and seeing how they would want to look in this and considering what is the aesthetic that we're both vying for here? With simulations, it's a lot of ‘how might people interact with this environment.’ So it's like there's a level of collaboration that's called for when it's not just me with my one pencil and my iPad that I think drives a lot of, not necessarily a loss of introspection, but rather a sharing of it. With the doodles it really was just a brain fart. Whatever was in my head is falling into pieces.

Would you say that it's a certain element of humanity that gets in the way?

For sure. I’m thinking out loud here, but it reminds me of writing. I spent my entire life writing, especially poems. You have all these thoughts that are lingering, you have all these dreams, and all these feelings, and then you're writing them out, really touching on them. We're constantly thinking, but we can’t always be writing. There’s an element of filtering, thinking ‘what about your thoughts stick?’ What about this can be put into a contract? What do we even do with it once it’s written and done? With artists, like writers, there is this constant dilemma of writer's block. It's just like the feeling of, ‘I'm not at a point where I can share exactly what I'm saying.’ There will be a delay where I'm able to actually finally actualize my thoughts. It's definitely human to think, ‘I can't always be making, but I can be dreaming, and I can eventually make those things that I dream of.’

You keep referencing artists vaguely. Who would you say are your main artistic influences? Poets, musicians–  I'm going to accept engineers as well.

Well, one huge influence for me growing up was this Irish musician artist who goes by EDEN. He just opened my eyes in a way that other artists hadn’t, they didn't blend between genres like he did. He was also my first exposure to Asians in mainstream media, and he was an incredible artist because, well, not only is his music awesome, but he's also heavily involved in every stage of his music production. He would often piece together videos out of photography that he had done. That was my first exposure to an artist that touches on everything that I was also touching on, like poetry, music, video. He was definitely a huge influence there. A lot of the influences I had came from growing up with social media - in a good way and a bad way. I was in seventh grade, on Tumblr, and just scrolling, and I would see crazy photography and crazy poetry. I don't necessarily know those usernames anymore, who wrote those pieces, but they stick with me in many ways. Instagram is also constantly just a visual stimulus. 

This is like a complete non-sequitur, but I really did want to ask about being a robot for an entire summer. Performance art?

That was actually a part of the VR study. My freshman and sophomore year, we were just building it. We would measure people’s brain signals while they were in the simulation. Eventually my professor was like, ‘oh, we should make this about human-computer interaction,’ as a next step. We were like, ‘how?’ He said, ‘what if we had a GPS?’ He was talking about a self-driving vehicle, because that’s huge right now, so many people are looking into self-driving cars. So I tried programming and self-driving stuff, and it just went over my head. I was like, ‘I don't know if this is possible,’ there wasn't really a framework for that. Funnily enough, because we couldn't make the actual model, the professor was like, ‘okay, what if we faked it?’ There's actually a couple of experiments like this, they're called Wizard of Oz experiments. In the Wizard of Oz, they go through this crazy land, and they realize that someone's behind it all. So for this past summer, I was behind it all. I was pretending to be a GPS, and a self-driving car - like I was literally just sitting in a room while everyone else was in the VR simulator. I was controlling this product for the participants, and talking to them. In ways it definitely was performance art, because I had a vocoder, my voice sounded robotic. That happens a lot in concerts, especially in hyper-pop, a lot of voice translation in real time goes on. I was fully faking being a robot, which was draining in so many ways. I eventually found a balance because controlling this stuff only took one hand, so I kind of split my brain and split the screen on my monitor, and would make collages on the side. I literally would have my computer open because otherwise I would have gone crazy pretending to be a robot for eight hours a day. I was making collages, and also working on a wearable device at the time. I did most of the bulk of my creative work while I was pretending to be a robot, almost out of necessity, because otherwise I was just going to burn out.

Wow. I'm assuming that that has had an effect on your creative work?

Going back to the feeling of grounding, it was kind of grounding to have that monotonous, algorithmic thinking in the background. Meanwhile, my brain is always going to go loose, this happens when I'm studying for exams - it's hard to look at numbers all day. My head just travels. Last summer, I really felt that balance where it was like, ‘this is highly monotonous, robotic work, but it also opens my brain up to being able to tap into some creative process there.’ I wouldn't do it again, but it was definitely an interesting experience seeing how my left brain and right brain interacted. I felt that for the first time, that I have a creative side and I have a logical side that are hand in hand and informing each other, but also not overstepping.

Now, at the end of this wonderful four-year study, at the end of college, looking ahead to grad school, what do you see as the future for your creative practice?

I'm really trying to get into music, and on top of music, visual production. There's so many traditional practices in that field, but all of them could be disrupted by engineering. A lot of manual work that goes into video editing could be streamlined with more efficient technology. There are so many avenues of music production, video editing, and image processing that are possible because of emerging technology. We grew up with pretty shitty– pardon my French– Instagram filters. They look really corny! Nowadays, they can compliment things so well. I spent so long writing and training my eye and also training my ear, but I never was able to just fully make music or fully make music videos. That is the direction I want to go in. I also think that there's room for me to also look into how I can help sculpt future technology, which is admittedly a very wide goal. I don't really have the vision for it at the moment, but I'm still happy to see how it intersects with my engineering and see where things can fall in place.

I wanted to ask this just because you've been talking a lot about it - what are your favorite concerts that you've been to? 

One big thing that I got into recently is these sort of garage artists working on modular synthesizers. Which are so analog, they literally look like circuits, and you plug things in, and because you're changing the flow of the current and the energy, the sound is completely different when you do that in real time.There's a huge community in New York, and especially in Brooklyn, where they rent out warehouses and throw these massive events, they’re basically raves. All the people making music have their own little room, but there's no doors, so the sound just travels. On top of the people who are making this music, there's visualizers, so there are people who are also coding in real time. Like I said, EDEN was another huge one. Because in his concerts, he would film things in real time, and then show what he was filming on the projector. There was an element of feedback and he would also record the crowd sometimes and then put it into a song in the future. I always thought that was a really giving way of interacting with an audience. There was another named Elohim, and she was huge on electronic music but also psychedelic visualizers. Her concerts were the first ones that I went to and was like, ‘whoa. I can feel what I'm hearing.’ A lot of this interfacing between music and images has actually kind of given me synesthesia, in the sense that I can now associate colors to sounds. That's part of the beauty of having some kind of visual element to music. This is why we have music videos. Even Spotify right now has those little GIFs on repeat while you listen. It definitely adds an element of storytelling to the music.

Is there anything that we haven't spoken about, or that I haven't brought up, that you want to talk about, or say?

I'm still trying to grapple with where art falls into narratives. Most recently, over the summer, I built this little wearable device that helped senior citizens track their mood and interact with what was basically a Tamagotchi. It would also share their recordings of what they're feeling with their families. There is space for creating technology that enhances or allows narrative. If there's one more thing I could say is that I didn't really include writing in my portfolio, because I wanted to kind of keep it audio/visual, but in the past, writing was definitely my first step into art. The feeling of reading and having storytelling embedded in me was how I even got my muscles to share. Growing up, a lot of what inspired me to even pursue art was the fact that I've written so many poems, and short stories that I wanted to become movies or songs and had to find a way to integrate them into something. Like I was saying, Spotify now has lyrics and the storytelling process, they're all just dimensions adding on one another, and they all go hand in hand. That's like a lot of what I've tried and will continue trying to explore.

Alison Siegel

Feature by Iker Veiga

Photos by Adela Schwartz

Alison Siegel is a conceptual artist based in New York City, from Denver, CO, studying Art History and Visual Arts at Barnard College. Alison considers their studio a laboratory in which they incorporate unorthodox organic and geological materials into their experimental photographs, sculptures, and installations. Today we discussed the scientific method, growing up, and going back to our roots.

Can you tell us about your first memories making art?

Oh man… I don’t know of a particular first memory of making art. I think it has always been there. Ever since I was a little kid I loved to tinker with rubber bands and paper clips, because I loved to play with my hands, making my own pulley systems and bringing things up the stairs of my home. It isn’t necessarily fine arts, but I have always been driven to create.

How does that playfulness translate into your craft? 

I think about what it means to be an adult a lot. Do you have to lose your imagination and stop having fun? A lot of people suppress their silliness, their play, and because of this, it is really important for me to explore those aspects. I don’t think creativity should die as we grow up, even though everything feels bleak sometimes. In the last few years I have lost a lot of people, and I have gone through a lot of grief and mourning. When I look into my art, I see it, even if I do not intend to put it there. Although there is a palpable tension between the playful and the more serious components of my work, I do not consider my playful approach to art as escapism, but as an outlet for the most serious aspects of my life. Through my projects, I do a lot of healing, and it is interesting to see how my work can convey all of this. 

MINE, 2022

What does your art tell us about your personal story?

I am from Denver, a big city, but I was lucky enough to grow up being able to go skiing or hiking very often. It is something really important to me, and I feel spiritually connected to (especially) the Rocky Mountains: I feel most at home in the woods. Coming to Barnard, I became aware that not a lot of people in the city have the same connection to nature that I have. There is still nature in the city, but it is not the same. In natural, unspoiled ecosystems, trees form mycorrhizal connections through the fungi in their roots and send messages to other trees through these networks. When you’re in a forest with an active network that is living to its full potential, you feel that. And the trees in the city feel really lonely and disconnected. My art explores how I coexist with that loneliness.

“When you’re in a forest with an active network that is living to its full potential, you feel that. And the trees in the city feel really lonely and disconnected. My art explores how I coexist with that loneliness.”

Whisper of a Leaf

Can you talk more about how nature influences the ideas in your art?

In Boundaries/Containment I was studying how we tend to categorize nature, contain it, and pick it apart: how borders construct the pieces of a transcendental whole. My Self-Portrait includes flowy shapes that are grounded on a human silhouette. It is easy and comforting to simplify things, but it can also detract from the complexities of life. This Self-Portrait was inspired by a podcast (I can’t remember which one) in which two scientists were speaking about how the biggest lie we tell ourselves is that we are one thing. We are just a ton of systems working together to produce what we call the cell. We think we are whole but in reality we are many multitudes and fragments. I believe that we don’t talk enough about how arbitrary the boundaries we set within ourselves and others are. What we can understand about the world is really limited to the physical input we receive through the five senses, but a lot goes on beneath the surface, where chaos reigns. 

Boundaries/containment

Selfportrait

Your scientific background  is really influential in your pieces. How do you incorporate the scientific method to create art?

I have a lot to say about the scientific method… I hate it! But I also appreciate it, because of how it standardizes experimentation. But I don’t know that it is always super helpful. Even though I experiment a lot with cements and plasters, I never have a hypothesis. I just go for it without a guiding question, which is really fun. Both art and science require a lot of imagination and thinking outside of the box, but science is much more of a linear process. And I have never been a linear person. So I have a lot of fun using the framework of an experiment, but being flexible and having fun with my pieces, rather than confirming a theory. 

That said, my background in Biology and Chemistry does translate to my organizational research skills, and my pieces are influenced by essays or journals that I read and theories that I am exposed to in my classes. For example, I took this really amazing class with Ralph Ghoche called City, Landscape, Ecology which mostly focused on Western Land Management, specifically in the United States. It was an interesting way of seeing how our modern view of cities, nature, and societies came into being. 

This is how my project Concrete Jungle first started: as a collection in which I began to think about environmental justice. There is an incipient tension between lines and curved shapes that parallels moments I noticed in the city: trees breaking through concrete or bricks, flowers growing on the asphalt… One particular piece, Marshall, has an almost human-like effect to it. I like to think of the materials I work with not necessarily as human lives, but not as dead either. 

Marshall

In what way do you question these moments, or traces of nature in the city, and use them to advocate for environmental justice?

A lot of what I am working on now only started last year, and is still in development. So I’m not sure about the role my art plays in climate justice advocacy, but I do like to raise awareness about it– I wish my work did that more. I just love the freedom of audience interpretation of my work, and presenting my pieces as facts would make the relationship of the viewer to my art very stiff. 

Therefore, instead of directly advocating for a change, I think a lot about how to reimagine spaces, and how to reimagine my own interactions with nature in the city. There is something fascinating about that to me–how human society has been constructed to be opposed to nature. There is a huge binary opposition that we all grew up accepting and is not true: things grow and live around us constantly, in weird moments relegated to cracks, sidewalks… 

Not long ago, I started to notice that a lot of garden beds and landscaping choices have hedges that are really flattening, especially on campus; Columbia has a really aesthetic landscape on purpose, exemplifying the idea that you can manipulate plants and that gives you power as an institution. On the other hand, if you walk around 135th and Broadway and look at the plant beds up there, they are not as kempt. My intention is to make the viewer notice these differences, not necessarily as an act of intervention, nor as a challenge of the status quo. 

Cambria

How do you emphasize the impact of human activity on the environment through your art?

Pieces such as Metropolitan Garden represent nature as a negative space engraved in cement, a fragment of our landscape frozen in time, referencing beautifully groomed plants or the fruit and vegetables in grocery stores, and how they have to be perfect looking and ready for human consumption. It points to the control humans exert over nature and how we attempt to have power over things that are so complex. It is an eerie piece, the essence of a leaf but not one. 

I started to work with concrete because it is a disgusting material. Its production is responsible for 8% of the world’s CO2 emissions, producing about 0.9 pounds of CO2 for every pound of cement. By working with it I wanted to think about  how we incorporate recycling or circular economy principles into an industrial infrastructure. 

There has to be a pretty serious philosophical shift in how we treat the materials we construct things out of and our understanding of nature, and how humans associate with each other in cities. And I think art can really facilitate that, making concepts around climate change that are petrifying accessible. It really helps you to think beyond what exists. 

A lot of people avoid these topics because they are extremely overwhelming. But that is part of the game. How can people reengage with these topics to change the status quo? Individuals having conversations about climate change is the first step: this leads to small structural change, whether it’s setting up recycling programmes, or creating Goodwills where good stuff won’t be thrown out. 

Metropolitan Garden

How do you want people to re-engage with your art and these topics?

A lot of artists strive to achieve a moment of full connection with their viewer. I don’t, actively. I don’t even care what they think about it, they can be like “that’s so weird” or “that’s so cute” and that’s OK! At this point I am desensitized to how people may react. But I do enjoy hearing the connections people make, even if they were not intentional. I want to create art that brings concepts that would normally not coexist together in an unexpected way. I want my art to foster curiosity and imagination in viewers.

I think of everything I do and each media in the same way, which made me realize that I was a conceptual artist. To me, everything is a composition which is completed by the effect it has on my audience. There is a tactile aspect to my art that I find really important. In spite of growing up surrounded by technology, I have always felt like an old soul, and it terrifies me that we are completely moving into these abstract environments where everything is digitalized. There is a lot of the human experience that is completely lost by fully engaging with those worlds. What I was thinking about when making Concrete Jungle is that I wanted people to play with it. I remember once I laid the pieces on my studio desk and invited my classmates to “play with them” and it was fun to see. There is something really nice happening in the body when it is exposed to different textures, how different parts of our brain are activated.

I also resent the gallery space (that stupid cube) and the idea that you can’t touch anything in a museum. I understand that some fine arts works are meant to be seen, but I am curious about what art can do to actively engage people. I want to emphasize the need to stay open and imaginative as a key part in any process: making art, writing a paper, maintaining a friendship with somebody… We need to find more moments to slow down and reconnect. Beyond classroom spaces, people are always afraid to touch my objects. And I’m like “Please! I’m serious!”, because it is OK; it is a part of the object: they have a history of their own too. 

Urban Recreational Design

Thank you so much for talking with us today! Where can we find your work and stay updated?

You can follow my Instagram page, @alison_siegel!

Chandler Jong

Feature by Nora Cazenave

Photos by Caroline Cavalier

Chandler Jong is a first year Master’s student studying Quantitative Methods. He finds beauty in life’s mundanity and enjoys capturing thoughts and memories.

I sit down in Joe Coffee, notebook in hand, to wait for Chandler. He speeds in moments later—a whirlwind—holding a giant pizza box, tells me it was given to him by a professor, and offers me a slice. He wears all black (turtleneck and slacks) and his demeanor is friendly. We get right into it.

Chandler is a first year Master’s student studying Quantitative Methods. I have no idea what that means, but I resolve to look it up later. One reason why he studies this is because he seeks to “understand people better.” This seems to be his driving motive, a throughline in both his photography and the way he lives his life. Originally born in South Korea, Chandler moved to the United States in the second grade, living in Georgia for most of his life. He’s moved around frequently, something that becomes apparent from looking at his photos. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he moved to Montana, Michigan, Ontario, and now New York City. He also mentions brief stints in California, Washington State, and Nebraska.

Chandler is someone who believes fundamentally, genuinely, in the humanity of everyone he meets. His central mission, through photography, is finding beauty and moments of intimacy in every interaction. He explains that labels are “superficial,” and that beneath our labels and layers, people have a “true self.” I’m prone to cynicism, so I initially find this idea ambiguous, and maybe a little surface level.

But Chandler’s belief in uncovering his subjects’ humanity is entirely authentic. “I think when people live their lives doing mundane things, like getting a cup of coffee, there’s that little spark of human interaction between the barista and the person who’s buying the coffee. That's the kind of stuff that I want to capture.”

In addition to this “human spark,” Chandler’s experiences moving from place to place have heavily influenced his work, though the constant traveling and relocating has been a double-edged sword. After graduating college, he was surprised to find the world as “dark” as it is. “I will say it's been surprising to see how prevalent misogyny and racism is in real life. Once you’re graduating from university, you think the world is what you hope it’s supposed to be. But once you go out there, it's not glamorous.” He tells a story about being in rural Montana the day after Trump’s election—a racist interaction, a white man telling him to “go back to China,” his fear in that moment. But I’m struck by his retelling of the story. “I’m not Chinese. But I didn’t say that. I just said, ‘I love this country. Do you love this country?’ And he said, ‘yes, I do.’ And I said, ‘Well, great. I love this country, too.’ And we hugged it out.”

It’s difficult to discern whether Chandler’s unfazed attitude toward what he calls an “unglamorous” world is shockingly hopeful, or if he’s simply been toughened by his experiences. It’s an attitude I’ve rarely seen reflected by members of Columbia’s community. “I have lived in many different places. I've met cowboys—I've been to bars, and I've drank alongside complete strangers, cowboys, with their cowboy hats and boots—Christmas Eve in 2016, that was a fun Christmas Eve—I have also rubbed shoulders with some rough people in Michigan. And you know, I've met these people, I've met conservatives, you know, and I'm like, I don't care about who you voted for. Who are you as a person? Living in these places allowed me to really see these people that I was interested in. You don't need all the labels.”

I ask if he sets out to tell stories with his photos, and he explains that he simply wants to capture beautiful moments on camera—the stories are a natural result. “It’s as if I’m documenting my life,” he says. He sees his portfolio as a sort of journal, each photo an entry. “Where have I been? Where have I lived? Where have I traveled? What was I doing? Well, there’s the photo to prove it!”

His photos all capture specific moods. While they range from city-scapes to street photography to landscapes (and more), each image shows an understanding of its subjects and its location. One particular photo stands out to me as unusually surreal—a woman on an innertube, a school of fish, everything bathed in blue—it feels like the interior of a fish tank. “That was taken with my Fujifilm X-Pro1, which is a pretty old camera, it’s really slow. Most of my photos I've ever taken with that camera always came out somewhat blurry. That is the only photo I've taken with that camera that I really liked. And it’s also super clear…The story behind it was I was in the Bahamas, I was on a vacation. And then there was an underwater slide. And I was taking a photo, and then a girl came down, so I timed it right, and then fishes swam by and it came out beautiful!”

His photos range from breathtakingly cinematic to incredibly personal and undeniably human.

In one particular photo taken in Japan, although I’ve never been there, Chandler captures a familiar experience—the hustle and bustle of a train station, endless crowds, and the feeling of solitude within a big city. “It isn’t intentional, but it would be nice to have people who view my photos feel as if they're there themselves. Because when I review my photos, it feels like I'm reliving those moments. And if someone can kind of do that, too, that'd be nice.”

His advice to other photographers is to “just do it.” He’s a self-taught photographer, who got started by watching YouTube tutorials and taking photos on his flip-phone in seventh grade. While he admits that being able to buy nicer equipment after graduation is what helped kick off his photography career, he is adamant that expensive equipment should not be the only key to taking good photos. “Even if you have only your cell phone, your cell phone is enough to take really good photos too. Don't let your camera be the only thing that stops you from taking your photos. Just do it.”

The flip-phone is what catalyzed his passion for photography. “That's when I really began getting into photography, just taking photos of things that I thought were pretty, and then seeing things from my perspective…I just wanted to share what I thought was pretty with other people. It turns out other people think it's pretty too.” Again, he returns to this idea of capturing the beauty of human interaction in his work. “It's even more amazing to find that moment that will never happen again. This is a once in a lifetime interaction between two strangers. And I think those kinds of instances—you're capturing a concept, not just a pretty picture. That's really beautiful.”

When I ask if he has any plans or goals for the future of his photography, he says that maybe someday, if he has a house, he’ll decorate it with the photos. “I'm not conceited enough to think people will pay money to see my photos. So I don't know…I haven't thought this through too much. I will keep taking photos for the rest of my life. And then once I'm dead, burn it all with me, because I'm dead, and so are my photos,” he jokes.

Too late, I think. They’re already in Ratrock.

Penny Shapiro

Feature by Sahai John

Photos by Orla Meehan

Local New Yorker Penny Shapiro is a freshman at Barnard College. With spiral motifs and abstract images, Penny contextualizes abstraction by connecting her multimedia works of art to ruminations on nature, self-worth, and the world around us. 

Your work is a mix of acrylic, ink, pen, and pastel. What is your process of layering these materials?

The process starts at an art store. I choose the colors that I naturally gravitate towards and the materials that I feel inspired by. Ink is something that has been an important part of my recent works. 

Untitled #18

I start by putting anything on the canvas. Part of the reason why I love making art is because it is freeing. I'm a very plan-oriented person, yet creating art is the one time I am capable of letting go of all expectations. A piece is not finished until I truly feel it's finished. Every work requires a lot of layering. It all just begins with a stroke, then a pouring of ink, then moving the canvas up and down, letting the ink naturally fall in place. Then comes adding shapes, patterns, more strokes and color. 

Every piece takes a different amount of time. I sometimes make pieces in one night. Sometimes I feel the need to spend weeks returning to it over and over again. Some pieces I work only with bigger gestures, and others with smaller details as well—it all really depends. Though I do think that, despite not planning, the more I create, the more I find a consistent rhythm. 

My paintings all look like things I have made and I’m proud of that.

You present many repeating patterns, like the spirals that come up in many of your works. What is your connection to spirals? 

It's my trademark. It began when I first started drawing. My mom had said that she used to draw spirals all over her notebook and I thought, ‘That's so cool!’ I felt so inspired. I was initially drawn to the pattern aesthetically, then as I thought about it more philosophically and I became fascinated by the fact that spirals exist everywhere in nature: snails, seashells, whirlpools, DNA double helix, the galaxy, the fibonacci spiral, our fingertips. So many spirals!

Rendered Skirt

THE PANTS and MADELEINE

I took this environmental history class in high school and it made me think about cyclical patterns and how nature can be so regenerative. Cyclical patterns are inherent to the natural world, yet modern society tends to be so linear. These “linear” systems, such as industrialism, consumerism, and extreme capitalist ideologies are proven to be not sustainable for life at all. They are hurting us so much. It's upsetting to me how Western societies have bent over backwards, trying to control and implement these linear systems rather than mirror society according to nature’s intrinsic patterns. 

These are things I think deeply about. And I want my work to be a reflection of my contemplations—What can we do better? How can we rethink our relationship to nature and each other moving forward? How can my art inspire circularity? 

You’ve talked about journaling as a way of conceptualizing your art. Is that how you develop meaning to your work?

This is a process that I usually do for my sketchbook works. I'll create them while watching TV, listening to music, or riding the bus, generally while doing more mundane activities. These works are even less thought out than my paintings, so I love to journal after I make them in order to contextualize their abstractions. And honestly, sometimes these journal entries aren’t even that deep. They could be about the simplest experiences from that day, the small things, the big things I've been thinking about in the world, things I've been learning in classes, or the things I’ve discussed in conversation with friends. 

New Sketchbook Work #1

To provide context for what I'm thinking about at the time of creation helps me process my own work. Thinking about the world and our existence is what influences the abstractions. 

Are you thinking about the placement of everything in your artwork and how it conveys a specific meaning? 

It really depends. I do believe that I think aesthetically when I paint, yet the process is still very organic. 

Skeleton to the Spiral Tower

This piece, Skeleton to the Spiral Tower, is supposed to be a representation of my thoughts regarding spirals and these linear ways of structuring society. I did not intend for this section of white ink to look like a skeleton but when I contemplated it after, it was exactly what I saw. It reminds me of the lack of care for life, and how so many corporations and politicians prioritize monetary gain over the wellbeing of all humans. I started to think about the relationship between the skeleton and the spiral in the middle, and only after creating this piece did I realize that it is an anecdote to human’s destructive relationship to nature.

What is your connection to self-portraiture? How do you want viewers of your work to see you? 

I don't know if there's one specific way I want a viewer to see me, but I do think taking photos of yourself can be empowering. Self-portraiture can be empowering, to be able to have the confidence to put your own face in a piece! I feel powerful using my own body as a medium. I could take a photo of myself at any point in time to make something right away. I'm right here.

The Puzzle Piece

When did you start doing photography and what is your connection to it?

My interest in art actually started with photography. During middle school and the beginning of high school, I took a variety of photography courses. My main passions used to be about fashion photography, but I didn't feel like I could fully communicate my voice through this medium. So at that time I found painting and drawing to be more fulfilling. After a few years, I returned to photography after engaging more with new mediums. 

Light Painting #7

I found that I really love making light paintings. I made almost all of my light paintings while dancing in my room with a flashlight. The camera captures all the movements of the light. It’s a really fun way of combining photography with dance. These works capture a lot of what my abstract paintings also capture. There's a similar aesthetic to them, which I think is awesome. Finding my voice through painting and drawing is how I found photography again, and I realized that I could use that medium to do the same. 

What connection does dance have with your artwork? 

Painting is physical. Making a painting is somewhat like making a dance.  There is a physicality to putting paint brush to canvas and my work is very gestural.

THE TIME CAPSULE OF MY MIND Film and Clip of Performance

This film, which is called The Time Capsule of My Mind, was created for my high school’s program, Choreolab. In 12th grade, I choreographed The Time Capsule of My Mind which was a combination of film and live performance. The film was projected onto the back of the screen in my school’s theater. Then, once the film finished, there was a transition between this projection and my dancers dancing on stage. To create that film, I utilized the light and acrylic paintings I had made in the past. I wanted the film’s aesthetics to mesh well with my painting and photographic style.

In the film, which is a combination of choreography, cinematography, painting, and photography, the connections between the way I paint, the way I move and film are apparent. These connections are something I want to think more deeply about and continue to explore. 

I also want to perform and curate performances more often. I really love the idea of choreographing for the group CoLab here at Barnard! It is a dance group that holds performances in the movement lab. It is a really inspiring space because there's so much you can do with lighting and projection. It would be a really great space to find connections between visual art and dance. 

A lot of your work feels like an expression of yourself and a way for you to show yourself on paper, a canvas, or screen.

It is an expression of myself and my thoughts, and the way I perceive the world around me. It's a way to get all of the language onto a canvas and to create something tangible that I can see and process in a different way than through words. 

2022 Self-Portrait

Do you feel like your art has shown the way you've grown? 

My art totally is a reflection of how I've grown. You can see it since the beginning of my work. It definitely has changed. The earlier works are so much smaller, but now I'm working on 24 inch by 36 inch canvases. You can definitely see how I've evolved as a human being and artist.

Gather From Everywhere Part 2

I've learned to trust myself. I felt like an imposter when I first started making art, and didn't want to label myself as an artist. I didn’t even think that I was making what could be considered art. But the more I create, and the more work I accumulate, the more passionately I associate with that title “artist”.

Do you feel like by validating your art, that serves as validation for yourself?

I've gained a lot of confidence over time in my work and then in myself too. Owning it. This is what I love to do. This is my art whether you think it's good or not. I don't care. I love making it. 

Untitled #19

Release

Where do you hope to go with your art in the future?

I don't know yet, but I will always be making it. All I want to do is continue creating and sharing it. I would love to be in a gallery, have a solo show, or curate an exhibition of my own. The dream is to actually pursue art as a career. But regardless of where I end up, art will always be my pursuit, and I will share it with the world no matter the platform, because I never want to stop. I can’t stop!

Where can we find your work?

On my Instagram: @byp3nny, and on my website: https://pennyshapiro27.wixsite.com/my-art  

Macy Sinreich

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

Lauren Lee

Feature by Julia Tolda

Photos by Amelia Fay
Production Assistants: Will Park and Mori Liu

Lauren Lee is a senior at Barnard, majoring in Visual Arts and Art History. She is a Scorpio sun, Leo moon, and Aquarius rising, originally from Malaysia. We meet at Cafe Amrita on a chilly fall afternoon. She orders hot chocolate, and we have a conversation about how she rarely drinks coffee. Stuck in her head is a line from Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind, that goes “When I'm with you, I feel like I could die and that would be all right.”

JULIA TOLDA: Why did you start photographing?

LAUREN LEE: I got into photography because I'm an introvert. At parties, I would be too nervous to talk to anyone, so sometimes I would bring my camera. And once you have a camera, you kind of blend into the background. You can deflect conversations by asking people if they want a photo. You take it and then disappear. A lot of my photography started out as this kind of “wallflower photography”. I like it when people pretend I'm not there—not invading—but rather capturing moments they'll want to remember or are important to remember.

Le Bain

Most of my work has to do with themes of being this weird, foreign body, occupying foreign space. When I first moved to New York, photography was a method of looking into this whole new culture. The photos I take here are not like anything at home in Malaysia.

JT: What is it that you like most about photography?

LL: I really like thinking on my feet. I enjoy being put into situations where I don't know what's going to happen. I love the thrill of unpredictability, and combined with the visual aspect of photography—making things look good and being able to capture them. Imprisoning a second into an image. And with film photography, it’s even more of a challenge. Once I fell in love with it, I really dedicated myself to becoming better. After years of pushing myself, photography had become a hobby, and then suddenly I had a portfolio!

JT: Is photography more than a hobby for you now? Where has photography been taking you?

LL: Photography is no longer a hobby, although it started as one. Having my work in galleries has made it more concrete, which is something I never thought would happen. If I had known this was something I could do, photography would have been a career option from day one. It’s nice to have a creative side! My experience with photography as an art has recently expanded to include painting and drawing.

JT: I’d love to hear more about your painting and your other visual artwork.

LL: My painting and drawings were really an accident. I had this phase last year, where I think life just caught up to me. I didn’t want to go to parties, all I wanted was to lock myself in my studio. One day, someone left this empty canvas that they had primed and gessoed and everything, just perfect. So, I was like “fuck it, let's play around”... And that was the most therapeutic thing that I'd done in years. I remember feeling so exhausted afterwards that I didn't even look at my work. I just went home and fell asleep for hours.

After that I slowly started to tap into painting and drawing, I wanted to make it intentional. I started going to the studio to play with color and also the idea of text.

I feel like my work is super child-like. Every time I do a painting or a drawing, I never plan it. I never know how it's going to be at first, but I will look at the work a week later and realize what was going on in my head—that I poured it all out into art.

JT: Tell me more about the role of text in your work.

LL: Photography made me view text as exclusively either found or created. In actuality, writing is so much more complicated than that. I started playing around with the boundaries between drawings and words.

A lot of the texts that I do relate to relationships, connection, and isolation. The words kind of just come out, sometimes inspired by songs or something else I’ve heard, but I don't plan my writing at all. It just happens.

JT: You touched on the idea of foreignness in your work, which many times can be considered quite political. Where do you draw the line between the personal and the political?

LL: Most of my work, I would argue, is very psychological, very internal. And I guess I mainly depict the female experience. There's a quote from a paper that I read that said “the process of becoming a woman is unremittingly grim.” You are not born a woman; you become one based on the environment that you're thrown into. My work is about my experiences, but it's not limited to me. I mean, being a woman is political, right? Nothing is too political

I do wonder about how other people perceive me and my work, though. Am I limited to that of a foreign being—an alien in your head? Or are you able to understand my work as universal? Oftentimes, when women look at my work they say, ‘This is super powerful, you managed to put these feelings I have onto paper. Men look at my work and I get a lot of ‘Oh, this looks like Basquiat,’ or 'This looks like Keith Haring.’...

JT: What are some of your inspirations?

LL: I like Rothko. I like sitting in front of that and dissociating. I used to be really into Basquiat before the super saturation, and the hyper-capitalization of his work… See, I hate saying I'm an artist as a woman and then not naming women as inspirations! There's a woman out there. I promise.

JT: Speaking of the female experience, how do you feel about the term “woman artist”?

LL: Have you read the paper Why there are no great women artists? Everyone's fucking read it at this school! The main point is that we have no great female artist because people didn't think women could do art. (And institutional obstacles, obviously.)

I hate the term woman artist. I am insanely tapped into how people perceive me, especially as an artist. When I hide my name from my work, I get different impressions on it. If the viewer knows I am a woman, that adds meaning to my work…

JT: Here is the million-dollar question. How do you want to be perceived?

LL: I want to be perceived as…[she pauses for a moment and trails off]. I guess as who I am. But that's tough because I don't really know who I am. I grew up in a totally different world: I was trained to know what the other person was thinking all the time and to cater to them. I always had to be a good reflection on my family or yourself and all that. I have this weird, twisted relationship with my perception of myself.

For now, I guess who I am is quiet, introspective, and kind. It's always hard being kind as a woman because then where do you draw the line of being stepped on?

I would say my art is bold, and I'm bold... I don't know. I would love to be perceived as this mysterious person who never comes out of her cave, and makes art [laughs]. I want to be that person, but we'll see.

Disco Boots

JT: How do you feel about social media? What do you want to show the world? What don’t you?

LL: Social media deeply terrifies me. I have this complex with Instagram where I hate posting pictures of myself. I kind of want to go total ghost. Maybe it's all my Scorpio placements… But it’s mainly something I just use to post my work now.

It's so scary to have your life on display in such a limited view for others to perceive. I took a long break from Instagram, and then I made the shift to mainly posting my work and not myself. I wondered if how others view me changes how they view my art. I don't even post most of my art because of how personal it is. If you notice, the text in my work is super small, like whispering secrets, almost.

Something about posting my work on social media seems like a challenge, especially works with text that reveal my feelings. I suppose that's the point of art: vulnerability, to create work that people can relate to. For now, I post just my main works or things I feel like the world should or needs to see. Hopefully once I graduate, I will go out with a bang and post whatever the fuck I want. My art doesn’t need to cater to other people’s feelings–I make art that should be seen! I need to claim that!

Find out more about her @laurenpohlee

Adela Schwartz

Feature by Sophia Ricaurte

Photos by Emily Lord
Production Assistants: Sungyoon Lim, Cas Sommer, Anushka Khetawat

Adela is a film photographer whose work spotlights meaning between subject and artist. Interested in what is earnest and vulnerable, she transforms personal perspective holistically. She is a first-year at Barnard from the Bay Area. 

It is a heavenly October Wednesday at noon when I get a call from Adela, saying that she has tested positive for Covid, that she’s taken rapids before but none with a T-line of such an unambiguous violet. We reschedule, easy, for fifteen minutes later except I nearly double the delay because my test runs of Zoom’s recording feature are giving me two dots and a mouth-slant—nonplussed at what, I don’t know. It’s 12:28 now. I better just send the link. 

Despite being ill, her spirits are high. Adela is so cheerful, it’s the only contagious thing buzzing through our laptops a few blocks apart. This, however, isn’t so much a shock given the style of her photography—with brazen compassion that, too, bursts through her work. Her photos of singular people don’t emphasize individual identities as much as they try to recognize something more constitutive and unprotected. 

When asked about her influences, she is shaped by the heartfelt: “That’s a hard question because I think I always go back to my family. My style for a long time was based on my brother, who is super cool. His stuff is really amazing. He picked up photography in a high school class and continues with it now. He taught me how to use a film camera—a little connection moment with my brother—and then I kind of went off on my own and started to develop my own style and dive deeper into the connection portion of portraits. In terms of thought processes within my work, I think about my dad and my mom. Something prevalent in my work is looking at things from a new perspective, which my dad has always encouraged. My mom is really curious, so that makes me look at the world in a different way too.” Her film photography is a rotation of the real. A wavering of the real, quite literally sometimes. 

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She hones her creativity outside of school, saying, “I didn’t really see myself as an artist until eighth grade because it was very much about copying things, and to me, it was like, why would I want to sit here and do that?” Following that year, she flourished into the artist label even more: “Going into high school, I went away to New York for a summer. I was fourteen, and it was for a photography class. That was when I got into portraits. That was the starting point.” 

Now, she mostly does film photography but she has worked in other mediums such as painting, drawing, woodworking, ceramics, and some graphic design. However, she says, “Classes weren’t really the way for me to produce stuff that I was proud of.” A first-year at Barnard, Adela mentions that she hasn’t had too much time to work on her art outside of courses, but, still, she says, “One thing that caught my eye from the roll of film I had developed here is finding places where nature disobeys the city environment or is stuck in between. I want to continue shooting around the city.” When asked about long term aspirations, she says her goals are to “just to keep doing it, developing my skills and connections with people and the environment around me over time.” 

I WILL BE

Some of Adela’s work plays on a 1:1 scale. She is interested in how people conceive of themselves insofar as her art can help bring more awareness and confidence to their self-image. Her work is a mode of caring. There’s a certainty in her art’s social effects because her subjects can be deeply involved. For one project, she says, “I interviewed people on what they felt insecure about. Then, we worked together to reframe it in a different light. There were five people involved in this project and two photos per person. One was a portrayal of the insecurity itself and the other was its reframing. For example, one person said ‘I feel insecure that I’m so thin,’ and so I asked, ‘Well, what's something that you like about your body?’ And he said, ‘Well my body works. It works for me.’ That’s where that shot came from.” The camera as mediation is more olive branch than it is distancing. Futuristic sites, abstract and physical, for unfamiliar and positive associations to sprout. 

WILL I EVER BE?

For another subject in this project, she says, “That’s my friend Naomi. She was insecure about scars and acne on her face. She had a bike accident earlier that year, and I said, ‘What does your face do for you in your life?’ She said, ‘Well, I can express myself through it.’ It’s more about personal stories than individual people.” Adela’s work espouses this shift in focus. It's a fresh concentration on the self. This photography feels like warm, buttered bread—salvaging, inviting, and needed. 

Adela adds, “Each photo, when I presented it, had a quote. So I would have a quote about the insecurity and a quote about the reframing. I left it in their words. I didn't want to add anything else because it wasn’t really my place.” Her photography carries a strong devotion to visibility and its power. These are careful acts of recognition, not just after an amalgamation of aesthetic choices, but also oriented towards a kind of therapy. Each photo is an outstretched humanity, an elastic taffy of intimacy. The work is interested in the true life of its subject as much as it is interested in artistry. Adela’s art is in medias res and refuses to neglect the before and the after. 

RIPPED APART

You can find more of her work at adelaschwartz.com!

Lolo Dederer

Feature by Phoebe Sarah Dittmore Klebahn

Photos by Norman Godinez

Lolo Dederer is a junior in Columbia College studying Architecture. She is a multimedia artist with a special interest in watercolor, acrylic paint and the use of found and gathered objects. Her work focuses on collecting emotions, moments, and physical items into cohesive images that inspire self reflection in their viewer.

When Lolo arrives at our meeting, her outfit is eclectic: paint-dotted jeans, several long layers of necklaces, and a green and white trucker hat. She greets me with a warm smile and immediately we get to talking about where to chat in order to avoid both the crowd in Joe’s Coffee and the rain.

We end up at the architecture studio where one of her classes meets. She tells me about her memories of creating. Her first artistic explorations centered around her mom who was  “always making stuff.” Lolo says that: “She’d make us little figurines and paper dollies and paper doctor’s kits.” Her mother had a studio at home, and on her and her sister’s birthdays, she would ask guests to bring homemade art pieces in lieu of more traditional gifts. One of the first pieces of art Lolo remembers creating is a paper full of little lines as a gift to her older sister Oona on her fourth birthday.

iwish

Lolo and her family save these pieces of artwork in binders. Although her mom was the first one who stored her art, Lolo is now the collector of the family. “I feel like I’ve always been a bit of a pack rat, and my family always makes fun of me for it. My mom would come to tuck me in for bed, and there would be rocks, maybe a pen, and other random stuff under my pillow.”

reliquary to an empty mind

Her current creative process draws on both her experience with collecting physical items and her desire to preserve memories and emotions. Over the pandemic, a friend encouraged Lolo to start journaling, a practice that allowed her to capture moments and feelings from her day-to-day life. Lolo’s journaling evolved into drawings in her notebooks as a meditation on transitory emotions and events. She uses journaling as a tool to “remember and attach myself to something that I have collected and is sitting in the back of my brain.” 

mon seul desire

This shift towards using her art as a form of emotional processing is fairly new. Up until a few years ago, Lolo’s art was more illustrative, a style which is still perceivable in her current portfolio. She states that her journaling “became a way to almost meditate on a feeling without putting words to it, which is something that we all can work on: not needing to always know how you feel. One of my friends always says ‘you don’t need to put a name to your feelings because not everything has a name.’ [Artmaking] is a nice way to just sit with things, and get away from obsessive journaling.” 

This meditative practice permeates Lolo’s current work. Her direct, spontaneous approach to drawing and painting can be easily seen in her figurative drawings. The piece “Egotistical Maniac” is a “portrait of self reflection” drawn after a run in Riverside Park. She recalls her process for the piece: “Sometimes you feel like your brain is all over the place. I had this really strange experience after running when I went home and said ‘okay I’m gonna draw myself.’ Sometimes when I do these drawings, I think about how egotistical it is for me to be sitting here drawing myself, thinking about myself.’ Trying to figure out the proper way to perceive yourself is kinda tricky.” This self-reflective tendency is echoed in Lolo’s choice of creative space, as she primarily likes to work alone in her room. She tells me that she prefers to create art in “a little cocoon to think and make.”

egotisticalmaniac

Over quarantine, she was able to hone the mixed-media and found object aspect of her work as her online architecture class encouraged her to build models with whatever she could find around her. This kick-started her recent foray into painting on found boxes and pieces of cardboard she picks up off the street. One of her paintings shows a single body, depicted in oil paint on a found cardboard canvas, with its head seemingly being torn apart into many different heads and faces. Lolo tells me she painted the piece after an argument with her mother.

Lolo is generous with her art and her creative process, hosting art making events for her friends in her dorm room. She and her roommate gather people together to create exquisite corpses—collective drawings where one person draws a tiny portion of a picture without being able to see what anyone else has drawn before them. She also volunteers with Artists Reaching Out, a club on campus through which artists teach art classes in elementary schools in the surrounding neighborhood.  

In teaching and sharing her art with others Lolo emphasizes going “a little crazy! I feel like taking the pressure off yourself in making art is important. Playing is important.” She strongly believes in the value of art—regardless of style, quality, or perceived “goodness.” “I’m a big proponent of whatever you make, as long as you are making things and you make enough of it, it's valuable.”

disturbingmemagenta

When asked about the future of her art practice, she answers that, “I hope to always have some kind of creative practice just for the sake of fun. I hope to be involved creatively, whether it’s creative directing, architecture, or at a design firm.” Lolo’s free spirit is palpable in her art work. It is impossible to witness without feeling a profound respect for both her and her artistic journey.

You can find more about Lolo and her work: @lolo.archdesign

Ashley Jiao

Feature by Claire Killian

Photos by Frances Cohen, Will Park

Ashley Jiao is a senior in Columbia College, studying visual arts and statistics. She reflects on the importance of process in her art making and how she has gotten to a place of growth and comfort in her artistic practice. 

Who inspired you or encouraged you to pursue art? 

In terms of artistic influences, I definitely have many that I've found through Instagram. I constantly look at new images every day, and artists that I follow on Instagram are definitely most of where I get that. I really like just looking at my wall which has art by Rae Klein. I've discovered this painter named Sarah Fripon, whose work I feel really connects with what I'm interested in right now. 

I also enjoy going to galleries seeing what the contemporary art scene is like. I'm definitely more inspired by contemporary artists rather than historical artists in museums because I'm interested in knowing what's going on right now. 

I'm also inspired by books and poetry. I think I get a lot of the ideas from images and phrases that stick out to me, that create a vivid image in my mind. For example, one of the books that I recently read that really influenced me is Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu. It talks not only about the sticky, disgusting side of adolescence and girlhood but a toxic adolescent relationship. The imagery mentioned in the book is really beautiful and striking to me as well. It made me think about animals and dirt and grime. Also religion and purity—a lot of different concepts. 

When I'm working I need to listen to music, especially playful and upbeat music. I also like when music is bad enough that it's good. It inspires me to be more playful and loose with my paintings. 

I would also say fashion and other forms of self expression also play into my work, especially with the color schemes that I'm into. I've noticed that I've recently been gravitating towards purples, grays, reds, pinks and blues, which correspond with the colors I like to dress in. 

Additionally, accessories and small trinkets inspire me. Because one thing I'm playing with now is scale, and I like to scale in on the small objects. I’m also toying with the concept of making decorative paintings that incorporate accessories in them.

You talked about your literary influences dealing with the stickiness of living and not shying away from the grossness and vulgarity of life, but then your musical influences are happy and playful. How do you reconcile these two things?

In a way my paintings are trying to find spaces with comfort, a happy mania within the grossness of everything. They might be two different sides of the same weirdness.

When someone, whether it's in a classroom or gallery, interacts with your painting, is there any particular thing that you want them to think about?

I feel like when I'm making my art, I don't really think too much about what other people might think of it. How they react is something I can't control; I'm just trying to externalize or give form to the ideas in my own head. And in that way, it sometimes feels very isolated—in a good way. I hope my art can bring the viewer comfort or some sort of resonance. 

But that's not something I can guarantee, obviously. That's not something I'm super worried about anymore. So I would say, in my paintings, I like to focus more on the form than content. For example, I don't start with an idea or a concept that I wanted to put on a painting, I don't want to be like, “oh, I'm gonna have a person here. and they're gonna be doing this.” The ideas start with a form in my head. I'll think of an image, and then I think about how I can display this image in a way that is interesting compositionally. And then I go from there, because the paintings are not making these big statements about any sort of content in particular. 

I read this piece by Susan Sontag about how assigning meanings to paintings is reductive, that explaining paintings alters the original intent of the artist. I resonate with that because even if I'm painting something about, let’s say, a plate of gummy candy, I don't really feel like that's what it's about. It's more so the image itself that really sticks in my mind and evokes a sensory reaction for me, rather than having to explain the ethics of gummy candy. 

Overall, I'm just making art as a form of self expression for myself, mostly just because it feels like very necessary to me to give permanence to the ideas in my head. I'm not as worried about how other people process my art, but it's really nice when people enjoy it and we have have sort of a shared language to talk about the art. 

Can you describe what your creative process is like?

It's changed over the years, but recently, I've been drawing from phrases that stick out to me. It doesn't even have to be from anything specific, or from my imagination. An image will come into my head, and I think about how I can make this image even more interesting. I write it down in my sketchbook. If I feel like it's compelling, and it's something I keep thinking about, I might put in the steps to make it into painting. I'll make a sketch, see what's the best composition.  I figure out how big I want the painting to be, then stretch my canvas. Afterwards, I will make an underpainting, and then keep working from there. 

I'm a pretty slow painter, and I'm also used to working very methodically. I like lists and step by step processes that keep me on track, because I feel like my mind is very meandering. If I don't make lists, nothing's gonna get done. 

How do you decide what sort of medium you want to use in a work?

I've moved into ceramics and sculpture more recently, but I’ve always been drawn to the tactility of three-dimensional objects; a lot of my work deals with, and appeals to, the senses, in a very childlike way. I like a nice three-dimensional surface that I can touch or something very tactile in the world. 

In the past, my three-dimensional work has been a little more conceptual. With my paintings, I start with an image in my head, and I know I want that image down, but with my ceramics and sculpture, I might be like, “oh, I want to explore modularity, or I want to explore something else.” For example, I made a house before that was out of ceramic. I was thinking about family history, the remembrance and forgetting of family history, and my childhood and adolescence. 

A lot of the time, my paintings and my three-dimensional work pair together; usually the same things inspire them. In general, it depends on if I think the three-dimensional spatial element will contribute to the work at all. But I really enjoy all these mediums.

How did you first get involved in art? 

I doodled for fun in school. I was obsessed with dogs; that was my thing. I would also doodle a cartoon duck on all my homework. I distinctly remember sixth grade: I was doing poorly in my art classes. I don't know why, but I find that funny now. I don't come from a family of artists or anything. However, my mom started sending me to an art studio where I learned traditional painting and the basics of oil painting which set a great foundation for my later work. I did art throughout high school, taking art classes and AP Art. 

Then for a while in college I felt like I moved away from art a little bit. I had not found the subjects that I was interested in; I knew how to paint realistically, but there wasn't one thing that was compelling. I wasn't compelled to make images in the same way that I am now, playing with composition and all these formal elements of the painting. Thankfully, I really found, or I have started to find, myself as an artist and the themes and the visual language that I want to work with. I feel like once you have a visual language that you want to work with, or you know resonates with you, it's a lot easier to generate images from there. 

I feel like I'm thinking about images all the time now. 

What is the most challenging thing about making art?

Recently, it's just been the slow pace that I work at. I'm just a pretty slow person in general. I think with the pace of life that we're used to in society, art making doesn't necessarily fit in.

I read this piece by Jeanette Winterson, and it was about art making and how when you make art as a job or to produce for a gallery, for any deadline, or for other people in general, it sets you at this pace that isn't natural for art making, because art making comes in waves. It's very natural to have to take breaks, to work at your own pace. 

I feel like because I tend to work at a slow pace, it doesn't always correlate with the pace that I'm expecting myself to be able to achieve, not because of outside influences, but just internally. Being patient with myself and getting comfortable with my own pace and being okay with having certain ideas and catching my work up to these ideas is something that's been challenging for me. 

Can you describe the headspace you are in when making art? 

Art for me, even though I work in lists and steps, is still so, so emotional for me. Honestly, in the past, every time I've talked about my paintings, I've cried because it's so deeply emotional to me; it’s a place that feels rooted in spirituality, and the metaphysical aspects of making a painting. 

My mom is a big influence, not only in my art, but also in my life. I've always kind of been told that there was a higher power, or something above us to believe in. When I’m painting, I'm in a spiritual, metaphysical realm. I view crying, and being emotional, as part of this. 

Art is deeply personal to me. It makes me feel like I am part of something, part of my highest self, maybe. It just feels right and necessary for me to be making images and painting. 

What’s next for you and your art?

I don't have anything planned right now, not for a show or anything like that. I'm really focused on making a new body of work right now. I've been working with gummy candies and making a series of paintings and some sculptures. 

I would say my work in the past was more figurative, representing the human figure itself, but I'm looking to move away from that.

The gallery space is so saturated with figurative work. It's just really exciting to take a break from that. Although I'm not completely shying away from it. I'm just finding myself more attracted to depicting objects and animals, and seeing what reactions those things can evoke. 

I'm really interested in iconography in the same way, for example, I think I'm really inspired by young, queer, tattoo artists on Instagram, and all the meanings that can be captured in a symbol. How we assign meaning to these symbols, and also how iconography can play into belief systems and religion and our associations with the world. 

My work recently has been me thinking about how we form labels and systems of meaning in the world and how we might be able to deconstruct this in a very adolescent way, where you're still in this very open, absorbing information phase, not making assumptions about anyone or anything. 

I've also been interested in scale and composition recently. Depicting small things really big, or having the subject take up the entire canvas, or an interesting section of the canvas is something that I play with. 

Also sensitivity to sensory stimuli. Which is something that maybe ties into adolescence too, because I think that part of being a child is liking to play with things and looking for gummy candy. 

And okay, maybe this is embarrassing, but I've been really into slime videos and ASMR. Overall, I think I'm just very attuned to my senses right now, so maybe that's coming out in the work a little bit.

It's taken a while for me to find myself as an artist, or at least get to the stage where I feel such a pronounced love for this process of thinking of and creating images. If I could talk to myself a year ago, I would just basically say, “be patient with yourself,” in terms of finding a visual language. 

Feeling inspired all the time is definitely not something that always happens, but it does come through making and creating more, learning from other artists, consuming as many images as you can and just noticing what interests you in the world—it doesn't have to be anything big. 

I feel like making art is very affirming to me. It feels necessary for how my brain works, because a lot of the time I feel like my self expression is blocked through verbal expression. This is the truest way for me to express my deepest self to other people—the permanence of paintings and art acts as a documentation for me because I am a very forgetful person. It is nice to have a record of what I was interested in at that time and be able to visually map my change and growth. 

Art for me is just so sacred and unexplainable. 

You can find more of Ashley’s work on instagram @leg____pageant

Joan Tate

Feature by Anna Lugard

Photos by Maria Shaughnessy

Editors note: the original piece published about Joan was a mistakenly uploaded snippet of her feature, and not the final version. Below is the updated and completed feature.

Joan Alice Tate is a Senior in CC studying creative writing with a focus in poetry. Joan’s work draws from her experiences growing up southern, spiritual, and closeted. She is interested in the body and mind as a locus for change, development, evolution, annihilation, and hope. She will be attending UMass Amherst’s MFA Program this upcoming fall. 

Joan Alice Tate exudes an easy confidence and an air of calm. She strides up to me without a hint of the typical harried Columbia speed-walk. We are meeting in Riverside park, Joan’s preferred creative space, on what feels like the first day of spring in the city. Joan tells me she has just arrived from a meditation class and is feeling at peace. We sit down at a bench overlooking the water to discuss her poetry and creative process. 

Joan was raised across the state of Virginia, moving from the North to the coast, and eventually settling in Appalachia, just outside the town of Roanoke. She grew up in a uniquely religious environment: her father is a fifth-generation minister in the United Methodist Church, and many of her other family members are also ordained. Joan’s religious background is an ever-present theme and inspiration in her poetry. However, her spirituality has expanded widely beyond its Southern Protestant origins. Joan describes her spiritual beliefs as “an amalgamation of Buddhism, Protestantism, Christianity… Catholicism, and Taoism.” She takes inspiration from Catholic mysticism and Jewish intellectualism, citing Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka as some of her creative influences. She is currently finding the most stability in Buddhism, and regularly practices sutras and meditation. 

Joan enjoyed an exceptionally literary upbringing. She grew up going to sermons every Sunday, which first kindled her interest in creative writing: “I loved listening to people talk, and the poetry of the bible. I became obsessed with words.” As a child, she was “a voracious reader” and wrote short stories in her free time. In middle school, she began experimenting with spoken word poetry, a phase she is grateful for - “it got my bad poems out really early.” By the time she was applying for college, Joan knew she wanted to become a writer. 

Joan’s journey from Virginia to New York was “a flight - that turned into an embrace of something new.” She describes her time at Columbia as divisible into two phases, separated by her gender transition halfway through college. As a freshman, she felt “angsty, frustrated, chaotic, and unsure about how to get to a point,” sentiments that came through in her creative work. Post-transition, she drifted away from Columbia and began investing in close relationships and immersing herself in city life. Her writing reflects this evolution: “Poetry was one of the ways that I processed my transition… it became more explorative about what it means to be a woman in general.” 

Dykin’ it 

I used to beat the shit out of my guy friends in high school
on the pavement or in the puce government carpet
behind a wall of backs we’d tuck away and
I never let go of a wifebeater, a crew cut. I dug in for the crowd
and stomped guts so hard Paul puked
sprinkler style all over his crisp ROT-C fatigues, laughing with the devil.
We all were full of passions. Mine was love.
All those men, now mechanics, section 8’s, cops,
pushers, and marines. To say I’ve stepped off that boat
isn’t wrong but it’s certainly misguided.
I never tried to be one of the boys,
I was just dykin’ it.
I was helping men see stars
the only way I knew how

Moving to New York played a crucial role in Joan’s creative expansion. She characterizes the South as a “gorgeous but very fraught place.” As someone who “grew up very strangely, gender-wise,”, Joan experienced “an odd discomfort of knowing and overhearing things you are supposed to overhear, about how you are meant to conform.” After moving to the city, she felt a new sense of freedom. Joan describes New York as a major creative influence: “I’ve tried to embrace the city as much as I can… being able to step out and see the city, to be myself and finally feel like my self is really wonderful––I think that is where a lot of the joy and brilliance in so much of my recent work has come from.” Joan is a “big fan” of the New York school of poets, including Frank O’Hara, “one of the central pillars” of her poetry. Joan also takes inspiration from Eileen Myles and Alice Notley, to whom she owes her middle name. Joan sees the quiet moments in the city as “at the core of the beauty that these poets capture.” However, she concedes that the best part about New York is that “you see so much insane shit - that inspires you, or makes you sad - there is so much in the city that has informed my practice. New York has really become my home.” 

Two Grief Portraits 

A. Still Life of Dead Hares
Our warrens have
run empty. My haunches tense
and moan awaiting
the bang of a gun

the shot of a redtail
from across the field.
The folded ears you water,
the clovered eyes

leaned on for years
look in from the threshold
before they sprout with iron.
I am waiting.

In the dark I am
waiting for the rest,
those dolls from up before
the strait-hatch opens...

B. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair
... and the deed is done. The door locks and the chair
sits softly, creaks
just before my seat hits the wood. A softened hand chokes the shears.
A group of ghosts is called an influence.

A group of hares is called a braid.
As if excess might be substitute for identity, long before
staring blindly out at passing songs, the slits of rain that open
with the AC hum and

a buzzing in the ear like how Grief manifests,
usually as a ring of keys in your pocket
leading you through a spine of doors.
A group of sinners is called a party.

A group of sticks is called a faggot.
Still, at night the sky remains lovely where'er we walk
(even if it is still not open for us) I worry about my eternal soul
falling down the stairs like a broken stone, or a burning chifforobe, like the light that leaves the stars for here

and can only call back
After Goya and Kahlo

Joan’s work is also influenced by her background in classical Latin. She has studied Latin since middle school and even considered minoring in it at Columbia. Joan describes herself as “a geek for Tacitus” and enjoys reading the poetry of Catullus, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in their original Latin form. As someone who “tries to figure out what embodiment looks like through poetry” she appreciates how “in so much of Latin literature, the text itself becomes this living,

breathing thing.” Joan imbues the intellectualism of classical academia with a distinctly current mutability. She is inspired by Latin literature’s openness to interpretation: “In these poems, you have to choose a route you go with, in terms of how you are going to read this.” She attempts to emulate this multiplicity of meaning in her own writing: “I incorporate a lot of punning, and ambiguous strange descriptions that can be interpreted in many different ways. I try to give the reader many avenues to flow down so that you can come to a different conclusion depending on your mood.” 

Joan describes her aesthetic voice as maximalist: “I like taking a poem or prompt and expanding it out into a lush, thick landscape. I want the reader to read the poem and embody its mental state, whether it is energetic, more sluggish and meditative, or insane madcap wacky bullshit. I want to create a playful space.” She has always found creative inspiration in the body, but her relationship to this subject has developed alongside her transition. “My poetry used to be entirely located within the body, and was viciously trying to get out of the body. As I transitioned, I was able to look outwards more. My poetry has expanded along with my own opening up.” 

Psychopomp (2021) 

... and in came Mrs. Swithin carrying a hammer.” - Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

My elbow disconnects right at the socket
in most of my dreams of the Escort,for I won’t go.

And there’s a fabric flexing over the mouth,
your gentle brace of lights, that bullish notch we breathe from,

all vanish, clean behind the rag while feversweats soak in.
The snapping of the limb becomes a sonic rag of grit

teeth rubbing up against the sulphur binding to release,
to say the words oh kidnap(!), Carrion, cuc-kooo-Koo-kooo.

And I am just filled with Ordinations.
Just as the eyelid bats itself within its borders

I am racked within my spongey cell of revelation,
archedback praise, tensions unprescribed, the eye unglazed, takes in

an Ordination form from where that grounded sleep was torn
and led behind the heaving of the crows
or the lowing of the bull.

And now her dull-clack teeth are shaking you awake in time,
like the shiver of a blade upon my shoulder,

like our checkered kite, hanging in the gloam,
like my fingers, wrapped round some slipp’ry feature,

like the crick of an axe on pavement, they will say
she peeled that fucking jaw til both hands bled

Joan’s poem “Tetrapharmakos” reflects her evolving, fluid understanding of God. She now sees God “much more as some sort of working within the universe, a joy that bubbles up from within the cracks.” In her writing, Joan variously genders God as feminine and masculine. Her poetry and spirituality are “constantly in flux,” as is her gender presentation: “I try to be gender non-conforming. I enjoy being masculine sometimes, but I enjoy being a masculine woman… being a butch woman means being an expression of strength, an expression of confidence, an expression of love.” 

Tetrapharmakos 

After Arthur Russell

I’ve got a crush or two,
a brace of figures on bikes.
Persuade me and I’ll take the leap. Give me motivation
to kiss my bright God or the other one.
A barbwire pocket chain, a point of reference,
that’s what I need. Because I would like to look sharp like Death,
with his sockets and blisters. Who knew bone could blister?
Who knew bone could be that hot?
I’d love to lay by and pop them with sick and red.
Who knew I could be so frustrated by it. God of course
wasn’t a fan, but when has she sought, where has she been
all these years

I was waiting for her, with my top off and fainting, the engine running,
lusting itself and me, sipping exhaust
in the absence of motherhood and fanning without. Crude everywhere! The bass
strings she uses to keep her time were tweaked
out and rusted. They call God “Mama Sunbleach” where I’m from.
She kept a whammy pedal inbetween her eyes and
wiggled it with her will or angels. Oh God, what a pain,
what a disconnect. Meditation doesn’t work anymore,
I’ll try smoking cigarettes rolled up in painters tape.

The tether is cut with longing and
whiskers fly ou—
Bring out the bone-man! Stripped because
it can be so hot so often. Burn him in his cloak, like an effigy, or a spectacle.
What a scythe! But what does it add up to in some grand scheme or
under its wave and brokers. Where’s the food,
where’s the tents, the barrels, where are the gums who reject her rope
or his teeth? We were by the rail, winding over bridges, no keys,
when they sailed by, handinhand and I choked on steam to see them.
They mocked me over the rushes
mocked me saying

that which is terrible
is easy to endure

Recently, Joan has been working on a series of sonnets, a form she first experimented with in her freshman year of college: “I used to go to parties, drink a ton and sit in the corner writing the worst sonnets in the world.” Since then, she has mastered the art of the evocative sonnet; her poem “Femmin’ It” is a complex, tender expression of love for her partner. “Pulling from the well of joy and happiness that has come from being able to look at my body after hormones and feel really ok with that - and feel really ok with that with someone else - that has really been one of the great joys of my writing.” 

Femmin’ It 

She found her dog in a ditch in Ohio. Gambel like oak,
cutest mutt around with a whine like a teeny tugboat,
the face of a quail, grimey little ratdog, cutie-little-pie,
her Familiar, jealous he watches me writhing in my bubble and
you draw me out mouthful by mouthful, scoop by scoop,
emptiness becomes the prajna shown to me through
holding your convulsive sleeps, the stumbles through your hair I
mumble things you're always saying, i blub you, gly glub glu,
Chelsea Girl, my dame of renaissance passions
all parts are good parts with you Aspen,
your smell like cologne and salt, your poet’s eyes, I’m
speechless in throes when you call the quiet names, you are strong,
blemished, and brilliant súch thát you shine, long
tongued beauty, my animal contortion, marvelous ebullient
fever to my soul, my stunning Aspen hooked up to my roots,
when you stop to stare at me the world just happens to grow

Joan probes the supernatural in her poem “Nobody in my life has ever told me how ghosts are made and now I really need to know.” Ghosts are a common feature in her poetry: “I’m really interested in the transitory space. Ghosts, as a construct, introduce the liminality of being between worlds, see through yet tangible.” Joan finds that the supernatural has the power to defamiliarize, to “break you out of your everyday life.” In general, Joan hopes to write poetry that will jolt the reader out of their ordinary existence - or rather, jolt them into a deeper understanding of the ordinary. “You read a poem, and suddenly a tree is not a tree, a tree is a reminder of someone who has left you, or life, or growth, or death. Poetry is a means of expanding language, and as a result, expanding experience. We are in a society that is so saturated with language that when a word means more than it used to mean, your entire world has expanded.” 

“Nobody in my life has ever told me how ghosts are made and now I really need to know” 

I just assume there’s this
iron lungmachine, god uses when he’s sad or heavy, just a
squnch of the torso and out of his breath and beard coughs proto-plasmic goo.
Yes. Of course. A phlegm of god,
a reliquary slime I’ll file away in jars and beakers and bathtubs.
It's green and biley. It rumbles when we touch it. Its bubbles smell sweet.
I send it flowing through our pipes to hear its bright rustle,
wandering the walls, see
the subtle irradiated gleam as it makes its way
into our bathtubs, our sinks, the granite washbasins
we keep hanging by our beds. If you dip a feather or a thread in enough
and wait a week's time,
by jove you’ve got a ghost.

Wait no. That couldn't. My senses tell me
the ghostskin is knit softly between needles. Or, more likely,
pulled from the backs of the shyest spiders, yes, spindly fellows
dim and with drooping eyes, but helpful, vocationally inclined
to form it tender
into a net, deep in the dark where it might be private
or in the ground where it might be empty or holy
so that the web might stitch together
so taut the spirits can
push their rounded heads upon the center, have made just for them a fine white sheet,
a doily, hanging with loose tendrils and flying silver threads by the breezes blown
and a million little eyeholes who turn crimson with sunlight
like freshly pulled glass.

Or I could be wrong again, terribly mistaken so this protoplasmic
fibre which is spider-guided is instead
a red herring. Is instead, only attracted to
the loose lint who bounces in your ears and pockets. who fills the bellies
of stuffed bears, mother geese. The squishy blue iguana’s beads
belong in ghost guts.
And so does mother’s roughspun Sally, my hawkish doll, with
her red dress, her orange chords and bow letting
faint smacks waver through my wet skin. my cold clothes.
and her bright eyes lodged ahead
to ring some darkened comfort from when mother set her down between
my palms. The fetish I squeezed through the brilliant door
to protect me in the street and barren attic. She
stirs in trembling fingers, holds vigil as the ghosts rush madly like trucks or moths
barreling into my light

Joan hopes to publish a manuscript after she completes her graduate degree. She is considering returning to New York to teach but may decide to pursue her spiritual path instead and join a Buddhist monastery. When asked about her idea of perfect happiness, Joan shares that she would love to live in a lighthouse with her girlfriends and write poetry. For now, she will be living in Massachusetts attending UMass Amherst’s MFA Program for Poets & Writers. You can find more of Joan’s work in 4x4 magazine and Quarto magazine. 

RGB Prosthetic: Session 3

FOCUS ON WHAT HASN’T BEEN FORGOTTEN.
START. Heat. Yes. There was a thickness in the skin. No,
too anaphylactic. A hole in the backmolar? Not quite yet. A hot
thread of iron. a needle held in a pilot light. More. The
flashlight shining behind the eyelid or the sun poking
through chemical plants? Exhaust. Evening like beginning.
When? Evening without time. I said when? The tip of her
stained cigarettes. Before that. A sun settling into the
horizon. so it sears the cows bloody. for weeks it’s just
sitting there. Right. Red Feathers. You were working your
apple with a knife so its peels curled into the cream
colored bowl. Lipstick. She licked her knife and yours. She
had grey fuzz on her top lip. Bucket after bucket full of rouged
skin you chewed like tickertape. Both your fingers ran raw
with callouses and brambleblood. Blackberry blood. The
stain where a face clipped the ledge below. Not yet. The
furrowed brow of a turkeyhen. After. The summer the dogs
went loose. the sun called you names from across the
garden. afterimages hung like sores. Summer leaves
reddened. they turned into dry smoke. Chiminea. Hellmouth.
Armchair. Furious gashes appeared on pink portraits. the
cross shattered. Shame. The paperback by the bed? or the
kitchen ashtray? The Ashtray. A wheelbarrow full of
feathers. More. A clean cat. a cut tip. Are we off track? A set
of red heels. Click. A new scab. a sun torn. Click. You
looked for kindling. slept in leafbeds. Spark. looked out at
the sky trembling because, the moon fizzed like a dry matchhead
CALIBRATION COMPLETE.RUNNING
SUBALTERN ANALYSIS. The retaining walls were hewn
apart by kudzu. the kudzu licked the bricks like flame.
What? An olive hoodie with “FUCK WOLF MAN” on the
back. was that here? The vines she whispers she loves under
the tide. over the yelling and her split green door she
smiles. brown door. A horde of funny needles prickled
against your new feet. i was breathing buckets of tulips. Light
through the mist of cut grass. i was so small. A lop of
hedgeflesh on the dusty road. the faint blip of fireflies
cutting gloam like a screwdriver. Beer Bottles. mason jars. The
house never stood right. the fields behind were like paintings of
Railcars. There's that butterknife you stowed under your
pillow. from what? The lights had gone out. a lack of lips.
Thick green smoke rooted through the chairs and the barn
doors. the goat cried like a man. There was a bird in the dark I

think. a bat. The flick of crisp heatlightning overhead as you
arrived. flight. silence. was that shame? The skim of energy
flooding across a field. in waves. You left the car and
prickled with ozone. you wriggled like the chrysalis you
stowed in the boarded chimney of the barn. I'd forgotten.
You covered it with a seafoam tarp. A crutch. An iron lung.
A chance. No one’s redemption. You found its wings half a
year later, that stale cornrow green. They snapped dry like
wafers. You couldn’t stop touching them. It wasn’t my fault.
The sound of spry greenwood bubbling in the flames.
CHECK COMPLETE. RUN. Do you like the way that
sounds? I d-The way I can temper? I never cooled. Do you
feel it? Y-The way the prosthetic reads and refracts you?
Like here. in her garden. You remember your uncle had a
macaw. Yes. Unmarried. You’ve only seen pictures of him
petting the thing. Maybe. Its wings were azure, sparkling the
same color of painter’s tape. Blue Shoes. like a set of lips. I
never saw it. The bird opened like a marlin behind the
screendoor. only in photos. Like light that plummets through
stained glass. He couldn't name it. It would make this sound.
Erin. Erin. Again and again his name he lives with his
mother, 80, and his father before he died she’s been hiding
her easter eggs in the nightgristle in the bluegrass remember
the bruises she gave your mother for prom night the
butterflies she caught you with a slap of palms. I killed it
didn't I? Lepidops. Pasture Sky. Sheets of water flapping in the
thunder. Where? I doubt it ever rained. A new pack of bicycle
cards was always strewn across the floor his cobalt guitar
leaned on the mantlepiece. The first time I saw the ocean I thought I'd
never shut my eyes. Back. That isn't here. It is the heat of
Summer in haunted pastures the macaw escaped bloodhaunted
and caterwalling as it flew through the slanted house calling for
him its falconer father keeper friend your grandma fried
chicken in her 12 inch pan and said it sailed “clean into the
skillet.” dead as a doornail it started raw as if it wanted to burn
but she crisped it up and blistered her fingertips pinching
at the the lost feathers the pilot light a Blue Feather She put
meat to work. Of course. Cooked a plate of parrot for supper
and sat on the porch waiting for the faggot to arrive. He
was always always late. never wanted to talk. She laughed pink
and blue when he arrived. Wait. He dropped the plate. I
know. I’m do-Kicked off his cowshit work boots. chipped the
skirting board. plucked a flame from off the stovetop. He sat there
s-Boiling into the porchlight. Easing into Lunacy: our rawest kind of
violence. Heaving so hard the grief had pickled his lungs to fat blue blots of smoke

Kate Miller

Feature by William Lyman

Photos by Rommel Nunez

Kate is a junior in CC majoring in Art History. She is a photographer and collage artist, heavily influenced by 20th century feminist photographers, vintage media portrayals of gender, and creating art from absurdity.

I’m late to Max Caffe, where, apparently, the vibes are “so good.” I send a precautionary text to Kate, who assures me that she’s enjoying the ambiance and doing some reading. I’ve known her for a year or so, and in that time I’ve recognized her as a character of casual coolness––stumbling upon a trendy brunch spot in the Lower East Side or going to cafes to do some leisure reading. She helped me arrange my apartment last summer and got us free drinks one strange night at Cowboy Jack’s. When I finally arrive, she’s stirring a half-full latte, dressed in a black blazer and pearl necklace. We briefly discuss our days, the weather, and 35 millimeter photography. I order an iced tea––which seems to annoy the barista––while Kate catches me up on what she’s been consuming lately: Circe by Madeline Miller, Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag, and Neftlix’s The Crown. “I know there’s a little shame in that,” she explains, “but when you take the Royal family and put pretty actors in their place, how could you not feel a little obsessed with the glamor of it?”

In fifth grade, Kate was convinced that she would be a fashion designer. “I carried around a little notebook all the time where I drew all my designs. I would compete with this other girl in my class. She was a much better illustrator than I was,” Kate tells me. The story serves as her first memories of herself as a creative, someone who had the desire to attach herself to art. “I always wanted a creative outlet,” she explains, “but I think I needed some instruction. I needed some pushes.” In her younger years, Kate excelled at math and science. She tells me that “the narrative was that I should do those things just because I could” and as a result, “art definitely fell to the wayside.” This path led her to studying applied physics for her first two years at Columbia, which she ultimately left to instead pursue Art History. She pauses and says: “I certainly do not consider myself a scientist these days.” 

It wasn’t until her sophomore year, in the early days of the Covid pandemic, that she found what she loved to do––collage. Like us all, Kate was left with lots of free time on her hands. She explains: “I'd been making art for so long, and really everyone who makes art is an artist. Sometimes it feels like a title that someone else bestows upon you, but I didn’t really have time to wait for that.” Living in the city, there was essentially nothing to do––“we couldn’t really go anywhere or do anything on a Friday night,” she explains. Kate talks fondly of nights at the Mexican Deli on 104th Street––eating tacos, grilled cheeses, fries, and Angry Orchard Rosé while collaging with her roommate. “Such a specific drink for such a specific time,” she says nostalgically. On these nights, Kate realized her love for the art form, of combining elements on the page. On collage, Kate says: “that’s where I started taking it seriously.” 

Kate began to collage using vintage magazines, original film photography, and materials she gathers during her daily life. “Texture is something that draws me,” she explains, as it is a representation of repurposing different elements. Kate continues: “Relation. Juxtaposition. Putting things together that aren't supposed to be together. I love that. That’s what draws me to art––the relationships between elements of the work and feeling unsettled by the things that have been put together.” 

When consuming art, Kate is “always drawn to work where you can understand what went on behind the scenes, where you can feel their hands in the work.” When I ask about her relationship to the world of digital collage, Kate pauses. “It feels like there's something missing for me,” she says, “there's this flatness that I don't like.” Kate appreciates art “as an escape,” and asserts that when she creates, she simply doesn’t want to look at another screen. She explains: “I do think some of my distaste for digital collage comes from that exhaustion of being on my phone, always consuming digital media.” 

Footage Fetish is a combination of film, sheet music, and exaggerated body parts. At Mother of Junk in Williamsburg, the place she credits for a lot of her discoveries, Kate stumbled across an antique dollhouse. She shot the house on 35 millimeter film, then combined it with another set of photos––a halloween wig sitting on a makeup mirror––to create the illusion of people in a living room. “My other projects have been a lot more drawn out and conceptualized,” she explains, “but with this one, I picked up two magazines and sat down, thinking: ‘I need to make something right now.’ It was a frenzy, a 45 minute cutting and gluing moment.” When asked what she hopes people will take away from the piece, she explains that: “I want people to interact with and engage with these works, but I don't need them to feel the same way I do about it.” It’s one of the things she loves about art––that “there is no right answer.”

In discussing her other influences, Kate seems to arrive at something essential about her work––highlighting the absurdity of cultural messages directed to women. Specifically, how these ideas have evolved through time. Kate discusses the trope of the “femme fatal” and its roots in Greek and Roman mythology––“Medusa, Circe, and other female characters who pose these mortal threats to men.” Kate traces this portrayal to film tropes, beauty advertisements, and media representations throughout the 20th century and into modern day. “The love of my life is Laurie Simmons,” Kate gushes. Simmons rose to prominence in the mid-1970s, critiquing women’s role in the domestic sphere through the use of doll parts, ventriloquist dummies, and toys. Kate cites Laurie’s series on the Stettheimer Dollhouse as a major influence on her work.

“The absurdity of these magazines speaks to me because there's so much content being created today. I'm interested in analyzing these old forms of media as a root of a lot of the problems in our society today, the way they've developed and progressed,” Kate explains. In examining these mid-century magazines, Kate is conscious of the fact that “so much of it feels like satire now,” but traces this back to the small breadth of information available. “People were solely consuming these magazines,” she begins, “just completely in the dark from all the other information and perspectives that were out there. They’re like a Bible in many ways.” 

The absurdism in beauty advertisements and cultural messaging is “super different today, because it's much more self aware,” Kate continues, “they're the same, but just coded.” I ask her about the vintage craze, about the age-old question of trendy thrifting––the buzz-words “curated vintage”––and she laughs. To me, there seems to be a great deal of absurdity in that concept, too––the anti-influencer who encourages the masses to search for character––how the past few years have seen a rise in uniqueness as a trend. “Of course, there's no freedom from these industries. You are always in the product, whether you choose to buy into it or not. We're always being influenced. The question is how you respond to it.” Kate poses an important question: “If you’re an amalgamation of the things that you've absorbed––is that not an identity?”

“During the summer going into sophomore year,” she begins, “a friend of mine from London came to visit and we had this really cool fun week in New York. We went to Chelsea market and I found this gold, embossed leather notebook.” She speaks hypothetically about this first journal, pulling a different book from her tote bag, opening it to reveal pages of collage and handwritten reflections. Her cursive intimidates me. “I started writing and I never stopped. That was four journals ago” she says. Kate takes me on a tour of her current journal, which is filled with scraps of paper, ink from brightly-colored pens, and film photos. Kate explains how the journal is home to many of her collage elements––film she had accidentally bought, a chapter-long meditation on Sappho, random song lyrics she connects to, or phrases she came across and wanted to remember. The journal even includes her Footage Fetish collage we had just finished discussing. It becomes clear to me that her journals are the centers of her creativity––where she collects and meditates on everything going on around her.

“It's so much fun. I love collecting things. I love looking back at them,” Kate tells me. She pulls out her phone and scrolls through her camera roll, looking for something. “My grandfather died recently, and we were cleaning out his house,” she explains, “my grandparents never cleaned out their closets and so there's so much crazy stuff.” Kate finds what she had been looking for, turning the screen to reveal a picture of a brown restaurant napkin. On it, written in blue ink, was: 

“Flesh and corruption were the same from the very beginning, and always will remain the scum of creation, the very opposite of God's wisdom, mercy and splendor . . . Man would manage somehow to crawl upon the surface of the earth, forward and backward, until God's covenant with him ended and man's name in the book of life was erased forever.”

It was a quote from The Death of Methuselah, a short story collection about Jewish folklore and legend. Kate smiles: “that was just written on a napkin, saved in the closet for years. It's one of my favorite things that I've ever held.” 

Returning to her journals, Kate levels with me. She says: “I'm opening this up and it's also all of my deepest, dark secrets. I would never say them to anyone out loud.” Kate continues: “The purpose of writing is not to have it read, but to get it out. I find a lot of clarity in writing. I don't write anything particularly creative. I really just write about my life. It's about leaving a record of a past,” she tells me. I prod Kate for further information on the journals. She explains: “they were the main thing I created for a really long time, and it was the only place I felt like I could create. In my will, the journals need to be burned. I think it's important to have that place that you trust too much. I think that there has to be a space where there's no restrictions. There's no limitations on what you can say or do.” 

Holding this fourth journal, that I learned she got on a January 2020 trip to Peru, I come to understand a lot about Kate––how she is actively working to make her life a work of art. She collects ticket stubs, ominous blue-inked napkins, expired film, cut up magazines, reflections on her life experiences––she is in the business of building a rich record of her life. Her journals are the original form of collage, as they are responsible for taking her experiences with friends, the city, literature, influence, and cultural messaging and turning it into a representation of her identity. “I'm just a girl who's consuming everything else around me and putting it together, maybe cherry picking content, ideas, and visual concepts that speak to me. That is a part of who I am.” It is how she deals with the absurdity of modern existence––recognizing her identity as a form of collage, of something accumulated through her experiences. 

Find Kate @kkatemiller on Instagram.

Taylor Bluestine

Feature by Sophie Paquette

Photos by Jane Mok

Brooklyn-native Taylor Bluestine’s paintings, drawings, sculptures, and AI-generated images embrace surreality and chance. Materially motivated, Taylor plays with texture and touch until she finds her desired shapes, the strange forms which lend her work its precious delicacy. As she closes out her senior year at Barnard, Taylor boasts an impressive body of work operating across modes and scales, and her experimentation has only just begun. 

Sophie:

A lot of your work pairs the domestic--frames, houses, bedrooms, chairs--with the dreamlike. How do these spaces interact in your art?

Taylor:

It's been a progression. Originally, I was doing this series that was very indexical. I started by making still lives and then deconstructing them, adding weird details and moments of color. It was like a painted collage. Some objects were domestic, some were natural. I would paint them pretty realistically and then construct backgrounds behind the images so it looked like they were cut from a piece of paper and collaged on the canvas, when in reality, it was one painting done cohesively. That was done using a lot of domestic materials.

Eventually, I got frustrated with that because I felt like everything was too fragmented, and I wanted to work on making whole compositions. That's where some of these more dreamlike works have come about, from that desire to not cut everything up and put it back together. Instead, I'm interested in how I can make something familiar, strange, and unique without having to disfigure it.

Sophie:

What you're saying about the implicit process of the painted collage reminds me of these hidden messages in your paper pulp. Could you talk more about making the paper pulp for the frames?

Taylor:

That's a medium that I really, really, really love. I've had an adventure with it. As an artist, if you work with a medium for a long time, you come to an intimate understanding of it. This is like four years of my practice coming to fruition.

I went to an arts-focused high school, and looking back, the projects were really sophisticated. We had a project doing embroidery, which you can see in my work now. We had projects where we had to create things from scratch, using cardboard, everything. We also had multiple projects with papier-mâché. That really influenced my approach to work and always wanting to dip my toes in new mediums.

When I started working with papier-mâché, I was like oh, cool, I wanna make some sort of sculptural thing. It was really frustrating at first. Nothing that I was doing came out right. They looked kind of like a kid's papier-mâché sculpture, very angular, which can be a cool and interesting look, but it wasn't getting to the level of sophistication that I wanted. So I also tried using plaster, but that failed horribly because the sculpture completely broke because it wasn’t sturdy enough. 

I'd had this idea of using paper pulp on my radar for a while, but I was really intimidated by the process. One day I was like, you know what, I don't really understand how to do this, I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm just gonna try because it can't be that hard. A lot of it was out of coincidence. My parents have a huge shredder in their room and they're always shredding documents. Every single bill they get in the mail, they shred. So I had this infinite supply of shredded paper that wasn't being used. I wasn't even thinking about the conceptual aspect, that came in later, but originally it was a material that was easily accessible. I started working with it, and I really fell in love with the materiality of it, and the way the inks on the paper dye the pulp when it's created.

Sophie:

It’s so interesting that the shredder comes from your parents' bedroom. Again, the work all feels very domestic. When did the paper pulp transition from just a material interest to a conceptual one? Do you consider the content of the pulp when you're making it, or do you rely more on play and chance?

Taylor:

I didn't realize the significance of it until I showed some of the work for the first time. I got a response from all these people being like, you're subverting use-value, et cetera. This is paper that has words on it, that's meant to communicate. And now it can't communicate anything. People wanted to know the process and the context, like where was I getting this from? What is it? It wasn't something that I had thought about because it was kind of obvious to me.

I love that the medium is super personal in that way. Every single batch you make is going to be different, and you don't really know what's in there. By nature, it's sensitive material, since it's shredded. So I don't really think too explicitly about the content. I am just happily surprised when I get some interesting papers that are in there and I get a really cool pulp. The one for that zigzag frame had blue credit cards in it, so it has this blue neppiness. What I'm working on now is a lot of shredded checks, which have this yellowy and speckled quality. So for the conceptual aspect, I really love that it has all these secrets, but I think it's almost more alluring that I don't know exactly what's in there. I'm arriving to it after it's already shredded.

Sophie:

When you show the frames, do you want the viewer to be aware of that process and where it came from, or do you prefer it to be this intimate or sensitive thing? Do you think the viewer's awareness of the material changes their interaction with the work?

Taylor:

I don't think that knowledge is necessary to engage with the work. I wouldn't be using the medium if I felt that, aesthetically, it wasn't successful on its own. I do think the concept adds an interesting underlay to everything in the sense that these are surreal images inside this kind of wacky frame. You can't really tell what the drawings mean and you can't really tell what the original paper means. It's just not that anymore.  It’s just not what it was anymore. People get excited when they find out about the material. They think it has hidden meaning, which is funny because again, it was the result not so much of something that happened not as a conceptual decision but a material experiment development. So I'm torn, because I don't think it's necessary to know about the material, but at the same time, the reactions that I've gotten from other people emphasize how having that information made them see the work in a different light.

Sophie:

Do you ever record any kind of process documentation?

Taylor:

No, because when I'm working, my hands get actually disgusting. Like I'm a reptile with a second skin of glue. So I try not to touch anything.

Sophie:

The physical work all seems very manual. Aside from the frames or sculpture, even the graphite drawings have these tiny sketch marks, or you're working in embroidery or on very small pieces. As you move into AI-generated work and other digital work, do you feel that loss of tangibility?

Taylor:

I definitely do. These works don't really feel like they're mine in the same way. It  feels like I'm a conduit or a curator. I'm the one pushing the button, generating them, and choosing which aspects to put together, so their existence wouldn't happen if it wasn't for me. But there's something about manual labor that is like, okay, I made this. Artists have definitely challenged this idea, and it's kind of a traditional mindset. But there's something about having a work that you made with your own hand, versus something that a computer made that you facilitated.

Sophie:

What's your process for your AI-generated works?

Taylor:

I use a website called Artbreeder. It's called Artbreeder because it literally analyzes images and then assigns "genes" to them based on a standardized image. Each image is created with these genes and you can cross-breed images that have different genes and get different results. A lot of the work is more curatorial because I generate like 300 or 400 images and then I go back and edit down to the ones that I really like. There are different formulas for AI generation that you can play around with, and you can go in and edit the genes of the images yourself. It’s  weird and dystopian, but still fun to play around with. 

Artbreeder is an interesting website because there's something skeevy about the name and the way it's having you factory-farm these images. But at the same time, the stuff you get is so precious. The moments and the colors. AI has such a unique and indistinguishable feel once you have an eye for it. There's nothing else that makes images like that and you can't really translate it. If you try to replicate it, it's not the same.

Sophie:

Displaying the AI-generated work, would those be on screens or would you print them out?

Taylor:

I've been struggling to figure out what medium to do those on because I had a studio visit and I was talking with Piper Marshall, who's curating the senior show, and she was talking about how frames act as a sort of protective element for these delicate graphite drawings. AI works are the opposite. If you’re familiar with Hito Steyerl, the AI works are like poor images. I've been thinking about putting them on fabric. I've been thinking about just projecting them. I don't know. I'm still thinking about that.

Sophie:

A lot of your work seems small scale, but you have these moments that push outward, like this big chair in the photo. Even within pieces, you manipulate the space of houses or bedrooms. What does size mean to you in your work?

Taylor:

A lot of artists are really obsessed with making really big things because of this conventionality we have that big work is more professional and sells better, or should be regarded as a higher form of art. I definitely bought into that for a long time. If I was painting, I thought it should be as big as possible. Then, I was doing an independent study with a professor who’s also the head of the art department at Barnard, Joan Snitzer. During Covid, we were working from home––I've always only really worked in my bedroom or at home. I think that's part of where the domestic stuff comes in as well.

Again, it's less of a conscious deliberation, but more about the environment that I'm in when I'm making these pieces. Joan assigned these really small works, and said to do them really quickly. If you look at the chair photo, those are the small works that are on the wall. And she was like, yeah, I don't even think you should make big works, here's your assignment: you're gonna make 300 small paintings. So I made 300 small paintings. Once you start working on a scale that's easily transportable and that you can work on anywhere, like comfortably in bed, it's hard to go back to wanting to do huge ambitious stuff.

Sophie:

You work in so many modes. Are there any materials you'd like to try?

Taylor:

I was looking into learning how to do stained glass, like ornaments or hanging stuff.

Sophie:

That makes a lot of sense. There is a light that comes through all of your work, like the drawings or the AI. They are all sort of glowy.

Taylor:

But again, I get kind of psyched out by starting with new materials. The initial commitment, ordering the kit and starting something, sometimes can feel daunting. Which is funny because I'm always doing it. 

Sophie:

Where else can we find your work?

Taylor:

I post my work on my instagram @ddddeathmetal. I also have a website. 

Shiloh Tracey

Feature by Sophia Ricaurte

Photos by Dennis Franklin

Shiloh Tracey (he/they) is a multidisciplinary creative based in New York City. Exploring the intersections of oil painting, collage, textiles and performance, they channel artwork which explores intergenerational and intercultural healing, ancestral knowledge, Black and queer subjectivities, and ecology.

This interview was conducted on an April afternoon at Riverside Park, looking toward the Hudson, sitting in the rain.

How do you like New York? 

I love New York. I’m a New Yorker by heritage. My grandfather moved here from Jamaica when he was young, and my parents and grandparents grew up in the city. I don’t know how much I’ll like the pace when I’m older, but right now, I like the dopamine rush, I love clubbing, going to concerts, park walks, running into friends, getting up early before everyone else is awake. I try not to stress myself out or rush to get anywhere. On the flip side of that joy, there is pain, loss, and existential terror. COVID cases are rising, so I’m planning to go out less. Historically, Black communities are being priced out of their original neighborhoods by gentrification, and I’m interested in abolitionist alternatives to our current policing system. 

How would you describe your background? 

I’m Caribbean-American and was born in New Rochelle. I’m trying to learn more about my ancestry, often by going through old photographs. I’ve been interested in art since I was very little and started painting seriously my junior year of high school. I’ve been going to PWIs my entire life. I went to a private school in Baltimore for K-8, and then boarding school in New Hampshire. I identify strongly with my Blackness, with my queerness and my transness. My upbringing as someone who was socialized as a woman also largely plays into how I observe myself in the world. But all of these identities are not who I am at my core. They define me in some ways, but beyond that, I’m an artist with friends who have helped shape who I am. They’re rockstars. Hopefully I've helped shape them, too. 

My Mother’s Child

Who are your influences? 

I have many influences in music, writing, and visual art. Lygia Clark  is an inspiration of mine from Brazil. She worked on proposições: incorporating viewer participation. I love The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Also Julie Mehretu, who describes her abstract work as a “time-based experiential dynamic.” Brene Brown helped me see true growth that empowers and humbles and does not respond to punishment. My mother is really important to me and so is my younger sibling Gio, who makes music @nonamedugly on Soundcloud. There are others: Ottessa Moshfegh, Haruki Murakami, Junot Diaz, Pat Parker, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, CAConrad, Coyote Park, Faith Ringgold, Kara Walker, Hilma Af Klint, Diedrick Brackens, Héctor García. I could go on and on. 

Do home and religion converge for you?

The earth is my home. My first performance art piece was literally called Earth Church. Pre-high school, I would attend Catholic church with my father and his girlfriend before I stopped having contact with them. I would also attend Buddhist convention centers and visit other practitioners’ houses with my mother. In high school, I would go with my then-close friend Ahlam to the Muslim Students’ Association every week. I’ve always enjoyed the iconography of religion, and I feel at home in the bigness and painstaking intricacy of churches and other sanctuaries. I love the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, a one-hundred-year project. It embodies the kind of intention I’m seeking to nurture in my work. I don't focus on doctrinal religion and don't believe in any one religious institution. What I do, say, and believe is setting myself up to be at home in any place, especially because I was constantly moving when I was younger. Making a home, for instance, out of these tiny rooms in my high school and college dorm rooms, where only my furniture stays the same. 

I actually wanted to ask you about “Earth Church (Pacifist’s Polemic Against the Lawn)”. Could you say a little about the piece and its inspiration? 

It’s hugely inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who wrote Braiding Sweetgrass. She talks about personhood in indigenous societies, not just humans, but plant and animal life: everybody in one network, all deserving to be communicated with. Before the performance, I kept seeing “lawn renovation” signs around campus. Space is so hard to come by in the city, and here was so much being used for show. In the US, there are around 40 million acres of lawn, used to grow one plant we can’t even eat. I had everybody lying down on the lawn around me in a circle. It was an invitation to feel close to the depth of the investment in this fear-based project. 

Earth Church (Pacifist’s Polemic Against the Lawn)

I feel like I often connect the natural world with the divine. Could you tell me about your sensibility in the divine? 

There is felt-knowledge that’s passed down. My loving relationships allow me to expand this safe space within myself, where my soul holds hands with God. It’s a space which contains the world within it. Occupying that space puts me in touch with past selves that I abandoned somewhere along the path. I started reading tarot this year, it’s a process of communion with your personal symbolisms and a way of developing trust in what you’ve seen and observed, and also trust in what you cannot see that is influencing your life. I’ve had some really insightful readings thus far on my own. 

Lovers in Blue

What’s your relationship with feminism?

My relationship with feminism has saved my life. I feel that way about many socio-political movements, but especially feminism. I ran an intersectional feminist club in high school with my really good friend Chinasa: my queerplatonic life partner, they’re actually the only other person I’ll trip with. We were both learning about our own capacities as leaders within an institution that didn't always appear to be friendly to or accommodating of the voices of Black folks, queer folks, and women. We were exercising our power from this love-standpoint, and that’s where I first started reading bell hooks, who is a main pillar of my feminist thought. I've been out as trans for two years now, and I started testosterone during that time, and went off of it because it didn't feel right for me anymore. 

Much of my identity is just going to be for me and my most intimate relationships. Sometimes, someone’s idea of a woman is inclusive of me as a tall Black person, other times, it’s not. It’s tricky. I also have had to steer clear of white feminism, which collapses all experiences of perceived womanhood and doesn’t take into account the nuances of privilege based on other factors. Transfeminism has been an incredible tool for me to locate myself in the world. I love Sylvia Wynter’s posthumanism. She’s a Jamaican philosopher who argues that the concept of the human itself is problematic.

How Do You Know What Your Body Is

I asked that question because it’s a preoccupation of your zine “How Do You Know What Your Body Is?”

My zines were a major place where my poetry and visual arts began to intersect. The first time I called myself a boy was in my zine, which felt really good. 

BOY* Black Transmasc Reflections

That’s really amazing. What are you working on right now?

The zines were published maybe six months after I came out. I'm planning to work on another one on gender that addresses the shape-shifting I feel in my transness. This year, I’m focusing on expanding into abstract art. A lot of my poetry is about animals, social feelings, spirituality, and the Atlantic Ocean. I'm also really thinking about my senior thesis on cycles of birth and rebirth, the ephemeral nature of our world, and the things we treasure. That’s something my ex Beth and I talked about on our first date; they inspired me to do performance art and did a piece where they got legally married and divorced to someone they met on Hinge all within a month or so. My art answers a question that my body is living right now: what happens when I cultivate a gentle observation of myself, and turn it inward towards the unconscious realm within me? I’m thinking a lot about questions my body has posed to me throughout my life. Through my art, I’m investigating my body as living history. I’m making art that believes in humanity's longevity, and that in itself is prayer: creating at all, hoping somebody will be around to see it tomorrow. 

Wow. What do your creative processes look like? 

They’re very spontaneous. I’d like to systemize my process a bit more and figure out how to be more methodical about it, but for now it changes from piece to piece. It’s important for me to create an environment to be in tune with the expansiveness of my being, avoid people who cannot honor me in my fullness, and be accountable to others without being overly responsible for them or abandoning myself. I keep a dream journal and two life journals. I draw good energy from spontaneity, and I don't want to lose too much of that.

What are your current obsessions? 

Noticing and creating small kindnesses, not holding onto the resentment of space not being made for me, instead deciding to simply hold it for other people in small ways each day, and the universe pays that back to me in kind. There’s a poem about this called “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Lameris. They’re not these grand, massive gestures but they kinda are? I also started learning to stick-and-poke this year, “angel” is in script on my leg. I love my good friend and suitemate Chrystal’s Ghanian stew, and I’m collecting movies to watch outside of the American mainstream. Two I’ve really enjoyed are Xala, directed by Ousmane Sembène and Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love. I want to watch Chungking Express at some point, and Cinema Paradiso, a movie about memory directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. I’ve been watching a lot of Sailor Moon lately. I love Akira and have watched it several times. It incorporates the same chanting that I did when I practiced Buddhism as a child, and I love how grotesque the animation gets. 

I love that. Can you tell me something about the role of sound in the context of  Afro-diasporic and Buddhist traditions in your art?

I'm inspired by free jazz and how completely unintelligible it is. It denies musical structures and still calls itself music. I played piano for six years, and used to be in a jazz band. Jazz and abstraction are rebellious. Abstraction especially in the 60s was a huge fuck you to the art establishment. One of the things that marked jazz as a style was how it brought people together. It’s a creole genre basically, taking inspiration from both Europe and Africa. I do a lot of field recordings of soundscapes: sometimes water or rain. Soundscapes accompanying each of my paintings is something that I might try to do in the future. The jazz artist Nala Sinephro inspired me to hone in on inner silence. I’m trying to incorporate more stretches of time into my life where I just don’t speak, write, produce anything or communicate with anyone. Silence feels like a place where I don’t need to prove myself or speak to have an impact. 

Gut Wheels

What does healing feel like to you?

Healing feels like trusting myself, that I have agency, taking my drive seriously, that I exist outside my pain. It feels like believing my own experience—not looking to others to define that for me. Letting people who don’t know me well be wrong about me─not trying to chase down and correct all my afterimages. Trauma can make you believe that the whole world is out to get you, that you'll never find opportunity anywhere. Connecting with my ancestors in spirit is constitutive to how I heal. I try to build up the structures internally and make the connections externally to seek out those opportunities to carve out a life for myself, even when it feels really difficult. My body lets me know where it wants to spend my time, so it’s also about listening.

Where do you see yourself in the future?

I would love to do a solo show. There are galleries that allow you to rent out space for a month and keep the cover price of anything you sell. Freelancing is my dream. If not that, then being an art or Spanish teacher or art therapist. But I'm mostly thinking about which one of those positions will allow me the most time for art and potentially travel. 

You’re incredibly inspiring, Shiloh. Where can we find your work? 

Thank you so much! On instagram @shilohtracey.jpeg and my substack poetry can be found here. 

Lilly Cao

Feature by Elena Sperry-Fromm

Photos by Grace Li

Lilly Jean Cao is a senior double majoring in the history and theory of architecture and visual arts at Columbia College. Primarily working with oil painting, their work combines found cartographies with abstractions of the body, resulting in body landscapes that are embedded with socio-historical meanings.

What does your process look like? 

I begin with an idea of something general that I want to focus on. My most recent piece, Self Portrait, Pathological is interested in the pathologizing of the Asian body. It takes an abstracted, close up photograph of my back and imposes related cartographies. There are maps of wet markets, COVID diagrams, old scientific racist diagrams of the skull. I start by painting the body with gestural strokes to create texture. Then I layer one color over that and cover it with tape. I trace a cartography onto the tape, and use an exacto knife to cut out the lines. Then I repeat that several more times with new color layers so that each color intersects and peeks through the subtractive cartographies. This subtractive method works best visually and conceptually as I want to leave that space open for the obliqueness of abstraction. The visual effect resonates with history as nonlinear, as something where all points are interacting with one another. So far I have only been painting my own body, and expanding to depict models is difficult because of the violence of the process. When I work, I’m taping the canvas over, tracing onto it and then cutting out the tape, so it feels like cutting out someone's skin because that’s ultimately what I’m representing. That adds another dimension to the work which resonates with ideas of violence and transformation. [1] 

Self Portrait (Pathological)

 How does that relate to the dynamics of a map and these intersections of spaces and ideas?

 I'm interested in the history of cartography and its relationship to colonialism and scientific techno-rationalist justifications of domination. Cartography is a means to control space and implicitly control bodies. My practice tries to work through those histories by complicating the cartographic form, and by making it more abstract. I extend this by embedding it in the body and considering the way that the body has historically been treated and exploited as a form of space. 

One of the most insidious things about modern mapmaking is that it presents itself as perfectly neutral, scientific, and rational. Particularly with early maps that naturalize the colonial project, like maps depicting early colonial settlements as small encampments within a sea of white space representing empty land, which implicitly erases the people who were already there. I try to problematize that by extracting it from its ability to be representative of certain things in totality. 

Rhizome Set Drawings

With one of my pieces, Rhizome Set of Drawings, I drew from three different maps. One was an English colonial map of Shanghai, there was a Japanese map of China from one of the Sino-Japanese wars, and the third was a Chinese map of Tibet. All of these are related specifically to ideas of domination and control, but I wanted to complicate that by demonstrating the complexity of the history of China. I’m trying to dig through the nuances of that history by embracing the contradictions of the different directions of control and domination, and through viewing the map as a mechanism and ideology of control.

In the past several decades, there's been a shift in critical theory from historicism towards spatial thinking. Part of the reason for that shift is understanding the ways that social forces, particularly capitalism, are constitutive of spatial organizations globally. This turn to geography is interesting because much of the rhetoric of colonialism is constructed through depicting certain cultures, races, and ethnicities as historically backward. Space as a response to this tendency to historicize is a way of demonstrating that it's ridiculous to portray a people that are existing with you simultaneously as historically older. That space has a lot of liberatory potential. 

What does it mean to take something intimate and specific like the body and transpose it into a broader geohistorical context?

I want to problematize the idea that bodies are personal or individual. The way that we treat our bodies and the way that we see other bodies is socially constructed. This relates to the idea of queerness and non binary-ness, and ideas of gender more generally. People often underestimate how the ways that we treat our body are responsive to the way that gender is constructed, or the way that identity is constructed in society. It's not just trans people who alter their bodies in some ways, people do it all the time for medical reasons or aesthetic reasons. I'm interested in the way that skin and surface and body is an expression of social ideas, historical ideas, or a result of them or response to them. 

Close

The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz in her book Architecture from the Outside writes about the idea that, “all the effects of depth, of interiority, of the inside, all the effects of consciousness (and the unconscious), can be thought in terms of corporeal surfaces, in terms of the rotations, convolutions, inflections, and torsions of the body itself” As for my own project, I would extend that to include both interiority and sociality. The surface of your body can be an expression of something, but I don't necessarily find it to be an expression of individuality. I find it to be an expression of historical realities. This relates to another quote from Jack Halberstam in A Queer Time and Place that’s really important to me, it’s written on my studio wall, “What constitutes the alternative now is […] a technotopic vision of space and flesh in a process of mutual mutation […] for some postmodern artists, the creation of new bodies in an aesthetic realm offers a way to begin adapting to life after the death of the subject.” I understand the death of the subject as a recognition that the formerly individual or universal subject is really formed out of differentiated but intertwined socio-historical realities (and therefore cannot be understood as either individual or universal, or even really as a subject). My creation of “new bodies” by amplifying “corporeal surfaces” and embedding them with maps and diagrams, is an attempt to picture this different understanding of personhood.

What is that relationship like between interiority and abstraction?

My project and my ideas are indebted to the work of Julie Mehretu. In my work, and in Mehretu’s work, the relationship between representation and abstraction is tenuous, because we're drawing from concrete references and transforming them in ways that turn them more abstract. Abstraction allows you to represent something without being tied to signification. You can start with something concrete and then create an abstraction out of it that keeps the original referent as a haunting of the abstract result. That opens up this nebulousness that’s not doing anything didactic but that is still attending to socio-historical issues. The obliqueness of art interests me and that obliqueness is necessarily tied to the exploration of gender as not being this concrete reference, but an exploration of the way we relate to the dictates of society. The experimentation with representation is also the experimentation with how I relate to my own body, how I relate to history, and how I relate to sociality. Typically, I am depicting my own body, so by abstracting it, freeing it from the ways that the body is typically seen in the media, or the way that I'm taught to conceive of my body as an AFAB (assigned female at birth) person. By exploring the creases and the folds and the hills, I'm allowing the body to be something that it's not allowed to be elsewhere. Elsewhere it's tied to gender, tied to expression; here, it can just be what it is. 

Self Portrait (Archaeological)

In your work, how do bodies and their significance fit into both a wider historical context and a particular ascribed group identity?

The way that contemporary artists of color have to deal with identity politics is difficult because at this point, representing a minority group is profitable. So artists who aren't trying to profit from it, who are just creating work that they care about, are being exploited by the identity politics machine. Art becomes constrained by the expectations of your personal identity. Julie Mehretu, to me, is interesting because she's achieved the anonymity of a straight white male artist, even though she's a black lesbian, female artist, and it's in part through abstraction and the refusal to represent a legible understanding of what blackness looks like for her. Instead she's portraying these abstract ideas of urban spaces and architectural spaces which are touching on the problems of identity and of history and of culture. That can’t be reduced to just what her identity is. 

Skin I

Within the Asian-American community in particular, I think people are really drawn to symbols, images or cultural artifacts that we view as essential signifiers of a culture we’ve been separated from, but which are really surface-level expressions of an extremely complicated history. My parents are Chinese, but I was born here and I was raised very much detached from my ethnic and cultural context. I grew up in a predominantly Asian suburb, so many people around me have the same experience. I went to an Asian studio in high school, where many artists were trying to make art about their personal experiences by drawing from cultural artifacts that they consider to be representative of China, but really it was food items or stereotypical representations. I understand that too: I have a dragon tattoo and there's this desire to be part of our culture because we've been so separated from it, yet because we lack this understanding about it, we reach out to these surface expressions. Other queer Asian artists who went to Columbia, like Oscar yi Hou and Amanda Ba, deal with these legible symbols of Chinese culture in a way that’s really valuable, I think. Oscar specifically draws on these symbols in a highly self-conscious way and even highlights the disconnect between his inability to read or write Mandarin and his using it as an aesthetic sign. The way that my work tries to do it is more in the way of Julie Mehretu, which is to explore these ideas abstractly and to make my identity less immediately legible even as it is important to my practice. I’m finding a connection to my background through history, rather than objects or images. 

You can find Lilly’s work on their instagram @ljeancao

Sophie Paquette

Feature by Alex Avgust

Photos by Caroline Cavalier

Sophie Paquette is a filmmaker, writer and student artist in residence at the Barnard movement lab. Her work explores the themes of embodiment, chance and fortune through its playful aesthetics and depictions of radical intimacy. 

I met student filmmaker Sophie Paquette after her weekly roller-skate session in Riverside Park. As we looked for a bench––ultimately settling for the one featured in her short film: runaway––she told me she began her creative journey as a writer. The transition of her work into video format was a conscious choice, a way of rendering her process more physical: “I think I got a little antsy doing just page-based stuff. A lot of my writing was body focused, dealing with space and shape. My work was about bodily experiences, so I felt like the body needed to be physically engaged in the process of making it as well. With film, you can get your hands on a camera, you can move actual bodies in space.”

Runaway

As Sophie’s work developed, the themes it explored became deeply connected with the format it was presented in: for her, content, form and process all overlap, they are all a part of the same story. Her thematic interest shifted from dealing with themes of physicality to exploring ritual, chance and intuition—all of which she finds to be intimately connected with the way the medium of film connects with its audience. “The way we view film is very intuitive. It comes from this understanding of what it means to see things in sequence, what it means to connect a sound to an image to an amount of time.” 

While her work has a naturalistic, quotidian aesthetic, its playfully whimsical nature makes it difficult to place within the realms of reality. “All of my work exists in this weird space. I want there to be a sense of naturalism without it being necessarily realistic. There is a weird amount of coincidence and chance. That’s what I find exciting about film, finding these strange moments of fortune or chance that usually get overshadowed in real life. It’s this little magical spark.” For Sophie, a sense of magic is inherent to the multi-modal nature of film: the various elements of production come together to capture a specific moment in time in a way that cannot be replicated: “Even if I am making something realistic and narrative I still want it to have that charm of intuition and chance.” 

Out of Order

While she is comfortable with the idea of suspended reality in her work, Sophie greatly values emotional authenticity. She wants her work to feel impactful, coming from a place of real emotional experience. She doesn’t mind her work being interpreted as autobiographical, considering this just another component of presenting work to an audience: “It’s kind of funny. I performed the reading of this poem in high-school, the poem was from the perspective of a mother and one of my teachers came up to me after to ask me if I had a child. I think people want to find autobiographical meaning to performance. And that honestly doesn’t bother me.” Even if a piece isn’t explicitly about her experience, Sophie still feels like she leaves her own stamp on it through the process of making. “I do think it’s about me because I was there the whole time it was being made,” she explains. Sophie finds that her experience and her environment deeply influence her as a maker: by making the work herself, she necessarily leaves her it with own touch, regardless of subject matter. 

Look How I Like

Still, Sophie prefers to maintain an ambivalence in her work, and allow her audience to connect with it on their own terms: “A lot of autobiography just comes through. Writing creative fiction has kind of primed me for writing about myself.. I hope to make stuff that’s specific to me, but also has an amount of ambiguity so people can access it in their own way. ” She does not wish to limit the interpretive capacity of her viewers. While we can see her work as telling her own story, we can also find ourselves in it and discover our own meaning. As in all other realms of her work, Sophie likes to play with the degree to which her work is personal. “There is freedom in playing with what feels true to me but is not necessarily a personal experience, and how it can still occupy a character or a narrative space,” she says.

Recently, Sophie has started incorporating herself as the subject of her work. “When I was in high school, I was petrified of photos of myself. They made me feel horrible, and literally filled my body with dread and anxiety. But recently, I’ve gotten more comfortable with filming myself—part of it came from filming myself roller skating as progress documentation.” As a student artist in residence at the Barnard Movement Lab, a lot of her work started focusing on the movement of her own body and its potential for expression and exploration. She says/reflects, “I am much more confident moving in front of a camera now. Every single week, I go to the movement lab and usually end up filming myself.” 

She prefers to work in an intimate setting, mostly filming her friends and choosing familiar locations. Even when working on bigger projects, Sophie still prefers to have her friends involved. “I’ve been so lucky, my friends have been so gracious with their time and talents. That’s another reason why my work is so important to me, it represents the moment I realized how appreciative I am of the amount of support I have.” She is also aesthetically drawn to low-budget video work, finding it more physical and authentic: “I like when you can feel the hand that made it. You can feel the material elements of the shooting. There is no polished non-human sheen to it. The final product has an index of its own making.” Immersing herself in the intimate environment of the work’s production as well as leaning into the physicality of the process itself, Sophie finds each of her pieces to be uniquely aesthetically marked by their own making.

Self Care

Many of her videos feature depictions of radical intimacy, explored through multifaceted and often playful lenses. “I love pee scenes in movies. That’s basically what I structured the entire out of order short film around, having someone pee while holding hands. I think it’s just so complicated, it’s not sexual but it’s still so physically intimate. It’s also this thing we all do. It surpasses romance, it’s its own exalted experience.”

She finds inspiration for her process in John Cassavetes’ work, especially the manner in which he described his approach. “He talks about shooting with friends and non-actors, a lot of his first films are blurry and break a lot of filmic conventions. I was really drawn to this idea that even if you don’t have the best gear or technical prowess, if you care enough about the story, you can make something that feels electric.” She describes the insecurity she initially felt: “I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d never done it before. I didn’t have the same gear everyone had.” Applying Cassavetes’ approach helped her not only to overcome doubt but also to see the unique opportunities only accessible in intimate, small-scale productions.

House: a Sonnet: a Palinode

Sophie imagines her work being accessed in a close-knit setting. She tells me about a video installation she recently saw at the Whitney, featuring a My Barbarian retrospective, including the materials used for and in their videos such as masks and puppets as well as a large comfortable couch for viewers to enjoy the work from. More than just being comfortable, Sophie appreciates a viewing space that pays attention to the body: “I hate having to ignore the body to receive artwork. I don’t want to stand still to look at a painting, I always want to touch something and get really close.” She also appreciates the inclusion of material artifacts, as she sees their presence as grounding the final product in the physicality of its production. She sees her work being displayed in a similar fashion, allowing people to get comfortable and interact with it for long periods of time. 

Currently, Sophie is learning to do tricks in her purple roller-skates, listening to Mitski and reading Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner. You can find more of Sophie’s work at: https://www.whereissophiepaquette.com

Carlos Ochoa

Feature by Cathleen Luo

Photos by Gabi Levy

Carlos Ochoa, a senior in Columbia College studying Architecture and Visual Arts, talks about the inspirations for his Goya-esque oil paintings that comment on modern issues of gender and social media. Using thick strokes of earth-tone paint, Carlos captures themes of consumption, alienation, and masculinity on his canvases. 

Carlos paints his self-portrait with furrowed eyebrows, rendering himself in moody browns and golden ochres of the classical Zorn palette. If it’s not a painting of him, then it’s other figures and characters whose anatomies twist in a moment of drama. His paintings are intense, brooding, even nightmarish at times, yet when I met with him to chat at Uris Library, Carlos was thoughtful and vulnerable about his inspirations, digging deep into the darker parts of himself to understand universal issues with body and image.

Vaquero

When I first encountered Carlos’ work on Instagram, I immediately thought of Francisco Goya’s feverish portrayals of humanity’s underbelly. Carlos is flattered by my comparison and goes on to describe how Goya’s art is “reflective horror,” something that can be seen in his own work. 

Inspired by Baldomero Romero Ressendi’s work, Carlos explains: “in very few brush strokes, Ressendi is able to completely capture the psychology of a person.” Lucien Freud is another artist that influences Carlos, though in different ways; while Ressendi paints quickly and messily, Freud puts in painstakingly large amounts of time to psychoanalyze his subjects in his paintings. 

Carlos’ process adopts this subjective approach in both his painting and digital work. Though he believes that his digital and traditional art practices hardly overlap, his approach to painting traditionally and designing characters are the same. He says: “I don't think people are that creative, we're just good at observing, and then synthesizing those observations.” Though he’s inspired by movies and video games for his digital art, the personalities he creates are derived from real people. He pulls inspiration directly from his everyday encounters: “If I meet someone that I'm interested in, I'll draw them. I'll try to think from their perspective; what does this person do? How would they react to certain situations?” He never knows exactly why he is drawn to a subject, but he runs with his interest to create an entire persona out of his observations.

Because he doesn’t always have access to live models, Carlos frequently turns to self-portraiture. Unlike many other student artists, he actually enjoys classic figure painting and drawing, and his skill in accurately rendering bodies is apparent. For his self-portraits, he looks at himself to see the ways the light hits different parts of his arm, chest, or back. He laughs and admits his process might seem a little narcissistic. 

Self-Portrait

For anyone who paints themself enough, reckoning with your own image and how you are perceived comes with the deal. Carlos says that the theme of hypermasculinity often appears in his work since it’s an issue that plagues men who grew up on the Internet. At first glance, his paintings Cake People and Parasocial look like they are feeding into a gender binary that prioritizes the male-gaze, but unpacking the discomfort that arises from engaging with his paintings reveals deeper meditations on the toxicity of hypersexuality in society. He opens up about a problem that he thinks should be talked about more: the amount of pornography that is accessible to people at a young age, and how it distorts people’s perception of gender. He explains: “Even if you're not searching for it, there's so much of it out there. I've known people who’ve been trapped in the warped reality that porn feeds them.” He finds himself still working to shed the damaging ideas about masculinity andtraditional expectations of men to be macho, aggressive, and dominant promoted by meme culture. In portraying these themes of hypermasculinity in his art, he says, “the only way I could do it was with a very literal depiction…. It's not beautiful or cool. It’s not supposed to make you feel good.” 

Cake People

He believes media like the movie The Wolf of Wall Street embodies this issue. The glorification of Jordan Belfort’s life full of money, sex, and drugs was meant to be a cautionary tale about excess but ended up doing the opposite. Everyone wants to be Jordan, the powerful, rich, misogynist. For Carlos, it’s the gluttony and vicious indulgence inherent in hypermasculinity that informs his art the most. He feels a need to warn viewers about its damaging and disturbing effects on people’s psyches.

Parasocial

When asked about how he depicts these themes of excess in his work, he replies cleverly: “Well, I use a lot of paint.” He explains that he’s noticed that there is a lot of consumption happening in his work, whether it’s people eating food, or sometimes, even each other. Figures look like they’re hungry: “We’re surrounded with so much stuff, and we always want more.” In this way, excess takes on many meanings, excess food, sex, and media in his other projects.

In order to portray this craving, he draws a metaphor to his own addiction to sugar, a playful yet sickening example of lust. He recounts: “When I first got to Columbia, I realized that you can take a fucking cake for yourself from John Jay, so I would just eat an entire cake for dinner. It's obviously not good for you, but I found myself wanting more.” This sort of pursuit of excess pleasure, followed by nausea and disgust, is a cycle that Carlos is intrigued by as a part of human nature. One way he alludes to his love for confectionaries in his art is by using thick strokes of paint because it “almost feels like food; it looks almost tasty. When I'm painting, sometimes it feels like I’m putting icing on a canvas instead of a cake.”

Lujuria

Carlos admits that his experience painting Lujuria (which translates to “Lust” in Spanish), Cake People and Parasocial, were not pleasant experiences, but he felt like had to say something about a problem that he was so aware of. 

“I’m disturbed by how normalized [addiction to porn is]. It's almost weird to not watch it. And I'm not saying it’s bad thing; it's just the sheer amount that we have, how easy it is to access, especially for young people, and there are no repercussions or warnings. You could just indulge and indulge and indulge.” 

He says those paintings were a reflection of society and his own experience. The discomfort in viewing his art is meant to warn and prompt reflection on gender and sexuality. 

Excess is evident in many of his paintings, but one that breaks from this aggressive messaging is Siren. During the first week of the pandemic, he went home to his family who just moved away from his hometown in Florida. With the social isolation of the pandemic compounded with living in a completely new neighborhood, Carlos felt unbelievably lonely. The inspiration for this painting came from a sculpted figurine he made that ended up looking like a mermaid, reminding him of Disney’s The Little Mermaid: “She must have felt so lonely when she left the ocean and lost her fish friends. That's her home. I had just moved to Texas with my family and I knew nobody in Texas.” Visually, Siren is a “simple painting with just a figure with waves, a moon, sand, and a few rocks” but for him, it captures how infinite loneliness can feel.

Siren

Staying grounded in reality is a theme that runs through his work, and it’s even evident in the color palette he uses: the traditional Zorn palette. Zorn is a limited color palette of 4 colors, yellow ochre, ivory black, vermilion (which can be switched out for cadmium red), and titanium white. In other words, the effect of this color scheme makes paintings look “real” and “old” in its use of neutrals. Few artists stick so closely to this palette anymore. To Carlos, these pigments feel “earthy, grounded, and essential. When I paint with other colors, it feels like I'm not really engaging with my world.” 

When he ends up adding other colors outside this palette, it is meant to make a statement about artificiality. The pure reds and blues that can be seen in The Cursed Party and Cake People add an eeriness to the natural and warm environment. For example, in The Cursed Party, the clowns are painted in bright, plasticky red and blue, giving the painting a sickly aura. In Parasocial, the pinks and bright blues are used to highlight the insincerity on social media and the red “Instagram-like” hearts are bright and gory, rather than cute. 

The Cursed Party

When asked about how he developed his style using the Zorn palette and his unique quick brushstrokes, he explains that he did not always paint this way: “I used to draw extremely strictly often from photos in a very formal and rigid style, very realistic, ‘objective.’ Then I had Professor Susanna Coffey who taught me to be aware of your own perceptions of the world and paint that instead.” This advice added the dynamism to his practice that is now recognizable throughout his work.

Skeletons Still Life

Carlos is aware that his paintings stir up strong emotions in people, and he knows his art brings in judgment. In reflecting on how his art might be perceived, he says: “It's scary to think about how people can react to your art. I think, for the most part, I'm pretty normal. I’m definitely not a ‘tortured artist’ but I can see how my art comes off as edgy.” 

One thing that does scare him about reactions to his art is that, though he intends pieces like Cake People, Lujuria, and Parasocial to be a disturbing warning, people might take it the wrong way. In the same way The Wolf of Wall Street failed to warn us away from Belfort’s lavish lifestyle, Carlos is scared that someone might find ​​his paintings appealing or alluring. But at the end of the day, he’s made a piece of art that should stand on its own, and he has little control over how it’s seen. 

Sewer Rats

Beyond painting, Carlos also jumps from hobby to hobby every month: this month it's welding and rock climbing. When I ask him about what he sees himself doing in the future, he says, as a Visual Arts and Architecture senior, he’s hoping to go into illustration or product design again, but he will definitely keep art on the side. “I would love to work at a movie or video game company designing characters or environments, but I would not want to make painting a full-time job.” He’s candid about his reasoning why he doesn’t want to pursue fine art as a career: “I only paint when I don't have time to paint, so basically, I always paint at the worst times possible. Like when you have an essay due tomorrow and you're like, fuck it. I want to paint. That's one of my best work happens, when there’s a rush, desperation, an outlet.”

You can check out Carlos’ work on his Instagram!

Gokul Venkatachalam

Feature by Yao Lin

Photos by Maeve Cunningham

Gokul is a junior in CC majoring in Philosophy. They are a visual artist and a poet. They describe their art as a process of “harnessing and interjecting the forces of chaos onto the page.” Gokul’s art is heavily influenced by Islamic art, abstract art, and electronic and jazz music.

Entering 3R of Potluck House, visitors of the Special Interest Community cannot help but be wonderstruck by a wall full of collages, drawings and nicknacks hanging on the wall. There are photos of friends and family members, posters politely taken from elsewhere for demonstrative sarcastic purposes (an “avoid binge drinking” sign, for instance), and many pieces of drawings on black and white sketchbook papers. These drawings, varied in size and color, are the creation of Gokul Venkatachalam, a Potluck member, a junior in CC majoring in Philosophy, and a good friend of mine.

The decorations on the wall have slowly grown in size since the fall semester. Divided by a dinner table, the left side of the wall gradually became an enormous work of collage that documents the laid-back creative endeavors and daily lives of Potluck. Over spring break, Gokul and I decorated the second half of the wall, consisting of mostly their artworks. What I love the most among these pieces of work is a duo of drawings that I happened to put side by side. There is an accidental asymmetry: while one work is vertical, the other is horizontal. Such asymmetry is connected by their shared theme. Both of them resemble mountains, yet underneath the drawings’ loose representation of mountains, which at first sight seems to be a deluge of geometric shapes, is the core of Gokul’s work: it’s both non-representational and representational, both orderly and chaotic. Gokul’s work is a visual paradox that makes its audience’s gaze and thoughts linger.

To Gokul, their work to some extent is a vessel through which the stochastic and random makeup of our universe is manifested. Chaos and order are coterminous, and their way of drawing is a method to such paradoxical madness that we see in reality. When one looks at Gokul’s art, one sees unexpectedly realistic representations out of the clusters and compositions of geometric shapes. “It's really interesting that something can resemble something so continuous and compact—very real just out of an assemblage of scribbles or triangles, or tubes and knots,” Gokul says. The random aspects of Gokul’s art are in fact coupled with a lot of intentional choices of form. In their practice, they limit themselves when producing the geometric forms, while always trying to employ negative space and be precise in the types of marks they make. Sometimes, they pursue erratic, even mistaken forms of drawing. For Gokul, these artistic choices represent a very cognitive aspect of art: “This cognitive aspect of art, I think, is often underlooked when people think about art. Being more of a process artist, and being more of a conceptual type of artist forces me to think about my artistic choices in certain types of ways. And I think my philosophical background lends itself to that.”

Although most of Gokul’s earlier works consist of black ink on white paper, Gokul has been experimenting with color recently. While they focus on exploring the textures of things that one might find strange or unsettling in their black and white drawings, vibrant colors enable them to express a wider range of feelings, from joy to morbid horror. Last semester, after seeing an etching with white ink on black canvas at the Met’s Surrealist Exhibition, Gokul started experimenting with white ink as well as metallic pens on black papers. They found themselves creating different effects with this different set of materials. For instance, the white-inked pen is less finer than the black-inked pens, therefore the lines created with it are thicker and fuller, making it possible for Gokul to work faster, try new styles quicker and experiment with their art daily.

Islamic art has been one of the most important inspirations for Gokul. As a freshman, Gokul visited the Met and was dumbfounded to find themselves immersed in a world of Islamic art. ​​Staring up at the Islamic geometry, in various tapestries, textiles, architecture, and even on the ceiling of the exhibition, Gokul discovered in themselves a passion for nonrepresentational geometric art. Gokul also found inspiration in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Jackson Pollock, MC Escher and Paul Klee among others have been big influences on their work. 

Other than visual arts, Gokul also found their passion and inspiration in other art forms: music and poetry. Alice Coltrane was one of the jazz artists Gokul listened to when they first got into drawing—they distinctly remembered that they were drawing inscribed triangles. A part of Gokul’s process is to listen to the various layers of music, and try to translate the various movements in between those layers—whether it be layers of percussion, layers of stringed instruments, or how Alice Coltrane moves her fingers on the harp. Gokul would translate the movements of the jazz artist’s musical gestures and put certain clusters on the page, or make some geometric shapes bigger than others to emphasize a broader sound. Although one might not look at Gokul’s art and immediately hear music or see the resemblance that it has with music, their drawings are an art of the act of translation of one type of aesthetic material into another type. In fact, a few of Gokul’s close friends are jazz musicians. Listening to them while they practice, Gokul would usually feel the tone and the mood, and try to express the tone and the mood through geometric translation in their drawings.

Poetry is another significant aspect of Gokul’s artistic endeavors. Along with their jazz musician friends, Gokul hosted a jazz and poetry listening party last month and performed several of their poems there. Gokul describes poetry as a process of producing a voice inside of us that we didn't know that we were even capable of. To them, this possession of the poetic voice also comes through reading other people's poetry. “When you are really, really listening to the vocal timbres of speech, it's like really, really looking closely at the way things appear to the eye. It can get to the point where you will find every object very alien and foreign,” Gokul explains. I find their understanding of poetry incredibly relevant to understanding their art. Like how they focus on controlling the geometric shapes that construct the basic foundation of their drawings, Gokul has always been imagistic and focused on the acoustics of speech when it comes to poetry. “To write poetry is to produce the sounds in your head of how people talk, and you're surprised by how full and rich those voices are that you hear in your head. Honestly, even more than the speech that you hear outside when you're on the street.” Steven Jonas and Russell Atkins have been two of Gokul’s favorite poets for a long time. Although Gokul has found them doing opposite things with language, they converge on the same musical aspect of language that Gokul enjoys about poetry.

Recently, Gokul has been carrying out a collective art project. They ask others to complete drawings with them in various  settings, whether it be at a party or just a laid-back hang-out. “Art is inherently collaborative,” Gokul says, “even if it's ultimately a drawing on a page. Despite the isolated concept of me or the self, any individual’s artworks are still contingent on the various relationships that they have with the people around them. Artists are always part of a wave or a scene. Being transparent and conscious of the fact that there's a bigger thing outside of you that's responsible for your ability to produce art is very important to me.” Last semester, Gokul had other people complete a self-portrait that they had started on their own. “I wanted to really reflect the people in my life that I see myself tethered and grounded to. Because I do feel like my sense of self is dislocated, sometimes disembodied, but more importantly, spread out amongst the people that I interact with. I can't really conceive of myself in any other way. So even when I'm alone, the voices and feelings of others are always with me. I think that's reflected in my art.”

What Gokul said at the end of our conversation in reflection about art—not only drawings, but music, poetry and all forms of art—is particularly moving. “Art is a reflection or a translation, leading me to split my sense of reality. Maybe a lot of my involvement in the  practice of art is just trying to resolve the chasm that I feel between how my thoughts, the feelings are in my head and in my body, and how it is like in the external world. Resolving that internal and external chasm has always been something that I've wanted to do. And I think art––drawing, poetry, listening to music––has helped me feel more comfortable in my body, more comfortable speaking, and more comfortable expressing myself. Sometimes there are just a lot of things that I can’t express through language that visual art allows me to do so. As a person who experiences a lot of very rich and nonverbal forms of thought—non-representational forms of thought—It's my goal as an artist to show why that kind of thought matters.”

Gokul’s work can be found at @surfaces.depths

Em Sieler

Feature by Alex Avgust

Photos by Gabi Levy

“Queer, feminist, post-internet, new media, lens based, collage, social media, attention economy, mental health. All the buzzwords.” Em Sieler tells me these are the terms they used to describe their work during a class exercise. I met Em in their cozy apartment one late evening, and after commiserating about the hectic nature of being an art student at Columbia, we started talking about the central tensions in their work. Their photography inquires into online spaces and social media, exploring the interactions between the individual and their digital presence. Their work is particularly concerned with the role they themself play in the attention economy as an artist and an image maker. 

Em creates with the awareness that most images are made for advertising purposes. “Ever since the pandemic, I’ve spent all this time on social media being bombarded with ads,” they say, describing the way they noticed commercial images selling and conflating products with identity. As consumers, we are continuously prompted to reexamine what we are wearing and what sort of people we are in the same breath, something not even counter-culture is free from: “Nozw there is the idea of being a queer Brooklyn raver person, there is influencers for that and there is brands trying to align themselves with you and be like ‘wear this brand of underwear because you’re a cool Brooklyn person.’ ” In this whirlpool of visual commodification, they base their image-making practice on the notion that “Images are not just objective, they are not just there. They are selling something to us, so I want to be conscious of what I am producing.” 

Much of Em’s work utilizes themself as a subject, tapping into the themes of self-image, self-portraiture and self-reproduction. “I would like to control the way my image is shown and consumed,” Em tells me, opening up about the way they have experienced their images being circulated and sexualized without their consent. “My body and sexuality sometimes feel out of my control, especially when I am in public. It’s something that people feel free to comment on,” Em pauses, “for some god-damn reason.”

Their work is about “controlling how my image is put out…  and not letting somebody else take me and make something of me. I’ll sexualize myself before someone else can do it, and I’ll do it in a way I wanna do it!” 

Love

Em is also interested in helping others reclaim their image in a way that feels comfortable and affirming. “I’m happy to be the queer, female-whatever photographer, cause there are a lot of creepy ass male photographers out there” they explain. Em expresses a tension between their own vision and commercial projects in this regard, balancing between the way things are “supposed to look” and what they wish to portray and evoke. 

When they are not taking self portraits, they mostly collaborate with friends: “Before COVID, I was mostly going out with friends, dressing up, and taking pictures of them just doing whatever crazy stuff that we did. And you know, just being young and depressed.” Em describes. They want their work to portray a sense of intimacy, rather than appear staged or manufactured as they are also thinking about photography as a means to construct one’s identity on social media. “The whole thing of ‘this is my image on social media, I’m doing great’: I didn’t want it to be like that, I wanted it to be real—whatever that meant. A lot of me and my friends were dealing with mental illness at the time. As we still are; as many people are.”​​ Authenticity is integral both to Em’s self-portraiture as well as their collaborative projects, their work connecting to its audience through the quotidian intimacy it evokes. It’s easy to image one’s self as simply another one of their friends, tagging along just outside the frame. 

When preparing for shoots, Em focuses on grounding themself in the emotions the work is capturing. “Getting into the body and out of the brain, as an anxious, mentally ill person, is important to me. That’s the place where I can get into my art the most and not think about it. It’s a release, that’s when it feels the most real.” They center both their art and themselves in the moment, prioritizing active––as well as physical––participation, stepping away from compulsive forethought. “I’m participating in the moment, not really thinking about what I’m going to do, what I’m going to say, what this is going to say but I’m just being in the moment with the person that I have a relationship with.” Em’s work heavily emphasizes the proximity between photographer and subject, giving the product an incredibly intimate tone. They describe their process as very intuitive, as they largely work on short term projects and rarely revisit them: “I feel anxious to just go back and be like ‘Is it done yet? Is it done yet?’ So I’ll just kind of make something in one sitting.” 

One of their important influences is Araki Nobuyoshi, a contemporary Japanese photographer, known for his juxtaposition of eroticism and bondage within a fine art context. “It’s just naked pictures, a lot of naked pictures,” they chuckle as they show me a book of his works. They were drawn to the quotidian nature of nudity depicted, in contrast with the religious and mythic nudity usually occupying museum spaces. Araki’s work made them ask questions such as “Why do we consider certain stuff porn and other stuff beautiful and art?” They are looking to embody the same stylistic features, while sparing the exploitative and voyeuristic aspects of Nobuyoshi’s work which come with the gendered dynamic of a man making images of nude women. They are also drawn to the work of John Yuyi, especially her depiction of the relationship between the self and technology, as well as her satirization of the idea of an online personal brand. Nan Goldin is another one of their favorites, especially the authentic feel with which she approaches themes of sex and gender. “I like how she shows people who are real people, who are struggling and who are not perfect, who are not the Dalai Lama or whatever. They are just her friends.” Other influences include A. L. Steiner, an eco-feminist lesbian artist, as well as Dido Moriama, whose repertoire has a quotidian, documentary aesthetic present in much of Em’s work as well. 

Lolo

They see their work as deeply personal. “Feelings are very important, because they take up a lot of my headspace,” they tell me as I leaf through a book they constructed during the pandemic. The book is a portmanteau of charcoal writing, self portraits, candid images of environments, and fingerprints. There is a deeply intimate, almost confidential, feel in the book. It’s oddly physical, for a work that is entirely limited to the two dimensionality of its surface.

For Em, art requires a careful balance between interpretation and self-expression. They tell me about reading a quote from a studio conversation, claiming “If you need to be understood, you should go see a therapist.” Ultimately, they feel like “Art needs to say something, it says whatever is important to the person and that can be closer to home or further away. Mental health is a thing that happens to be close to home and Instagram is a thing that happens to be relatable to a lot of people.” 

Their own relationship to social media has been a complicated one. In high school, they had aspirations of becoming a social media influencer as a way of connecting with others through shared interests. Growing up in a conservative college town, they felt lonely and isolated, seeing social media as a way of celebrating self-expression. As this was how they first gained interest in photography, they consider this experience an ultimately beneficial one. It allowed them to connect with people, share their work and get inspired. Yet it was also a source of anxiety. “I took a year off from school to care for my mental health, and people from home, even people from here too, would look at my Instagram and they’d be like ‘Oh my God, you must be having so much fun, you must be so happy, you look so amazing!’ And I was like literally I am miserable right now, I hate my life. It just kind of hit me that this shit is so fake.” 

Despite its potential for authenticity and agency, social media also ended up being a place of fracture and misconstruction. Torn between being honest about their experience and leaning into the facade, they ultimately decided to tell the truth: “It made me mad that people would tell me not to say it, that it was embarrassing or shameful or that people would judge me or something. And I was like I’m working on my mental health and if people don’t like that I don’t really care about them, so. I will tell the truth.” Now, they see social media mostly as a business venture, maintaining it for networking and promotional purposes. They are grappling with the performativity of an artist’s online presence—the need to put forth an image of oneself as an artist while also remaining authentic to one’s own practice. “I am definitely aware of using social media to create some sort of cool artist image or whatever. I had a professor tell me I should keep up my social media presence, that’s how editors and galleries will find me. But I don’t like it, it still gives me a lot of stress and anxiety.” 

Despite this increasing sense of commodification, their work expresses a belief in youth and the individual creator’s ability to construct a counter-narrative. They see the role of the artist as one of reclamation, as well as open communication. “I would like my art to be the thing that starts conversations. I feel like that’s so cliche, but if I could have anything, that’s what I would want. When I get messages saying ‘Your art made me have a conversation about mental health’ or ‘It really hit home’, that stuff is why I keep doing this,” they said. “Don’t we all hope that what we’re doing has a meaningful impact on people?” 

While they may sometimes feel hopeless about the future and the increasing disconnection it holds, they also hold onto the hope that their art has meaning and resonance, making people reconsider their own engagement with social media and digital spaces, giving them a route towards imagining new possibilities of connection. 

Currently they are drinking iced matcha lattes with almond milk, wearing partially transparent colorful outfits, and learning to screen print on mirrors. You can find more of Em’s work at: https://emsieler.com

Lindsay Kornguth

Feature by Jane Loughman

Photos by Maria Shaughnessy

On the Lerner ramps, I chatted with multimedia artist Lindsay Kornguth about her visual art and music, beginning by looking at her early portraits of celebrities. From YUNGBLUD in color pencil to Brendon Urie on graphite on paper, Lindsay used to share these portraits on her Instagram in high school, hashtagging and tagging the names behind the famous faces. However, Lindsay believes these portraits are not simply a way for her to garner attention from these A-listers. She doesn’t see them as tributes to the artists, but rather as her own work. Actors, singers, bands, and fictional characters are important for Lindsay’s inspiration, not just for her visual art but also for her own career as a musician. 

(Left) Colored Portrait Study (YUNGBLUD), (Right) Black and White Portrait Study (Brendon Urie)

Since developing her skills in portraiture, Lindsay has branched out into animation and graphic design, and now majors in computer science with a concentration in visual art. However, Lindsay’s lowest grade in high school was in visual arts. Despite her parents spotting hints of a creative gene in young Lindsay’s doodles and sketches and later enrolling her in art classes, her high school art teacher did not respect her work. The teacher wanted Lindsay to make “real art,” not “cute” portraits of famous people and characters. Lindsay contests that point of view, and rather, views her work as a practice in perception; she says this herself on her website, which notes, “whatever I end up doing in life, I must somehow express my unique perception of the world.”

Black Panther

“I'm making something original. I'm seeing things the way that I see them. When I make portraits, it starts more with a fascination for the art itself, and drawing faces [...] is something that I always found extremely difficult,” she says.

Lindsay is often eager to take on new art forms, but she can be hesitant if it does not come naturally. She used to have a grudge against digital art, but now she is a big fan of her drawing tablet, with which she recently created a Spider-Man graphic. Lindsay tells me working on a tablet feels like sketching on paper, so she didn’t feel too out of her comfort zone. Since starting college and taking classes, she has also developed an interest for animation. She created a stop motion flipbook animation of Octopus, in which you can see her combine her skills in drawing with her love for visual storytelling. 

Spidey

Visual storytelling is still evident in her earlier works, as Lindsay enjoys playing with traditional subjects in art. 2 Cool 4 Skuul, an anatomical study of the skull drawn with prismacolors, introduces color to a classical art training exercise. Dance Macabre features another skull, but within it is an optical illusion of two fencers. In Portrait Distortion, Lindsay distorts a marble statue using graphite. 

Lindsay values her years of art training, but she has a love-hate relationship with studio art classes. In these classes, the subjects couldn’t include the likes of celebrity portraits, much to her dismay. Younger Lindsay would find class teachings, like routinely drawing hands to perfect the bodily form, frustrating. Now, she has reconciled with her adversity to classical drawing techniques, realizing that it's part of a learning process: "You're not going to get better unless you do the kind of boring things."

The classes have paid off as Lindsay has mastered drawing the hand. Her piece Submerged, a technically complex piece involving differing textures of water, foam, and bubbles features a man with cuts on his face and hand. The mark on his hand is small and subtle, but one can feel the wound. In Detailed Texture Study, as its title suggests, Lindsay again experiments with texture, this time with the texture of dripping blood instead of scratches. “I wanted to capture the feeling of blood coming down the wrist,” she tells me, and she does create that sensation viscerally with thick lines. For this piece, she was inspired by Panic! at the Disco’s album Pray for the Wicked, the “devil’s key,” and gore featured in Brendon Urie’s music videos. Though she takes inspiration from outside sources, Lindsay has found personal meaning in her drawing’s symbolism: “The fist feels triumphant, and it's covered in blood, which is kind of gory. It was more this idea of getting out of something painful. To me, the key represents new opportunities, new paths, and moving forward.”

(Left) Submerged, (Right) Detailed Texture Study

Music, particularly album art or music video aesthetics, forms crucial inspiration for Lindsay. Inverted Recreation is, as the title suggests, a recreation of Missio’s cover art for their song 'Everybody Gets High,' drawn as a photo negative and inverted. For a recent graphite drawing, Living Vicariously, Lindsay uses visuals from Muse’s music video for ‘Won’t Stand Down.’ She plays with the idea of control and technology: “the hand is not like the one that's playing. [The machine] is playing the hand that's playing the piano, which I thought was kind of trippy.”

Living Vicariously

Inverted Recreation

Lindsay finds her relationship to music and her connection to art very similar. She describes the two practices as being “locked-in”,  both with “rhythmic” and “repetitive” qualities After playing piano for thirteen years, she moved over to the guitar, picking it up very quickly with her musical background. She started a punk rock band—The Blowouts—at Columbia in her first year, but since the pandemic began, Lindsay has been focusing on her own music, uploading covers to YouTube. She was discovered by the record label 11:11 Music Group after her cover of Glass Animals’s ‘Heat Waves’ garnered tens of thousands of views. Together, they mixed the cover for Spotify, and it now has over 180,000 plays.

“So that's how that happened—it was just exciting. But other than that, I haven't been dropping a ton of music, so it's funny because I've got like one song on my Spotify.”

Lindsay does have original music on her Soundcloud, both songs having her own cover art designs. During quarantine, when Lindsay was cooped up in her music studio, she reflected on how life had changed drastically at the beginning of her formative college years. So, with MUSE as an inspiration, she created the alternative rock piece ‘THUNDR.’ Making the song allowed Lindsay to develop her range as a vocalist. When she sang for The Blowouts in a more punk manner, her vocals in her ‘Heat Waves’ cover are soft and dreamy, while in her original songs ‘GHOST’, it’s energetic, and in ‘THUNDR’ it’s moody. 

Music was an escape for Lindsay during quarantine, and she felt that the isolation was essential for her creativity and flow. Moving back to New York and experiencing the city opening up again complicated her ability to make music in the same way. “Going insane in my room is the main inspiration for a lot of the art that I made. I didn't have as much of that type of setting [when I moved back here], which I thought I needed to make art. I thought I could only create things if I was locked up somewhere.” Lindsay is currently working on adjusting this attitude, as she realizes that that kind of isolated lifestyle was no longer sustainable. Now, she believes that by giving herself space and time to reflect, “things will come naturally.”

As an artist, Lindsay sees no limits to her creativity. She is often questioned about how she has many artistic endeavors, that it sometimes comes across to others that she has “no idea what the hell [she] want[s] to do” with herself. But Lindsay does have an idea: she hopes to employ her drawing skills as an animator, all while keeping up with her many other artistic practices. To Lindsay, artists shouldn’t feel limited to one area or medium. Inspiration comes in many forms, and ideas need to have the freedom to be executed in a variety of ways. Making art is like an addiction, she tells me, that surpasses any one medium.

You can keep up with Lindsay Kornguth’s work on her website and reach out to her for commissions or collaborations through her Instagram, @lindsaykornguth.

Lauren Zhou

Feature by William Lyman

Photos by Dennis Franklin

Lauren Zhou is a sophomore at Barnard College. Her photography revolves around personal photojournalism projects with the aim of storytelling. 

In the far corner of Hex and Co.––where the walls are covered in different iterations of Scattergories, Codenames, and Catan––I talk with Lauren Zhou about her camera. It’s a Canon 5D Mark II, covered in scratches and missing the top button. It’s the same one she’s had since 2016. Despite its imperfections, Lauren talks affectionately about her long history with the camera. “It's literally been with me throughout this very long journey of me navigating my relationship with photography,” she explains. While she likes to constantly redefine her relationship with the art, one thing has remained the same: making the camera so much more than a missing button, but an object of her own personal mythology.

Currently a sophomore at Barnard, Lauren began experimenting with photography in middle school. She describes photographing landscapes she found pretty, or taking portraits of friends. Eventually, however, she found more meaning for the practice, focusing her efforts on personal photography projects with the aim of storytelling. However, the road to this conclusion wasn’t easy. Lauren describes a series of collections that changed her, along with the ebbs and flows of inspiration, finally leading her to now––where she feels more in command of her craft than ever.

Born in the U.S, she moved to the Philippines when she was seven which shaped her artistic journey. “My photography would be completely different if I wasn't raised in the Philippines.” Towards the end of her high school years, the stress of college applications and leaving the Philippines loomed. “I was really anxious all the time. I was waiting on college applications to come back. I needed an outlet for all of my anxiety.” Lauren explained, “so what I decided to do was to just walk around Manila and take photos of strangers I talked to.” This became her first major photojournalism project––interviewing and photographing people she encountered in Manila.

The series made her feel a lot more connected to the Philippines: “the photosare a way for me to look back on and remember my home for so many years.” The Philippines - 2019 series was Lauren’s introduction to the world of photojournalism, a practice which helped her better understand her city and her relationship to photography. “When I'm in a city, I look for its character and the things that distinguish it from other cities. [In Manila] the people are so bubbly, kind, and welcoming. And I saw that when I would interview people and they would talk about their family.” She remembers thinking: “I'm gonna miss this country so much.”

Following the Manila series, Lauren adapted this interview model for future projects. After coming to New York, she finds opportunities to interview and photograph any characters that stand out to her. “There's this one photo on my New York series of this man who would sit near the window in Starbucks every single day and he always had a different book. He was just the nicest person ever, and now, he’s not a stranger.”

Yet, commissioned portraits during graduation season posed a challenge to her enjoyment of photography. “During grad season last year, I really lost inspiration. I was doing it more for the money than I was for the actual artistic expression. I was asking: does this really have meaning for me?” Many artists struggle with the idea of monetizing their work, and for Lauren, this meant the creative outlet she has always returned to during hard times became alienating.

“After grad season, I stopped doing photography in the summer.” Lauren explains. Only after her grandma’s passing did photography re-enter her life as a source of comfort and a way of processing her loss. From there she sought to use photography to make a celebration of her paternal grandparents, who work and live in Flushing, Queens. “It's like my second home in New York,” she says of the neighborhood, where she visits a couple times a month. Her Flushing photojournalism project, Model Minority - 2019, explores the American Dream as it relates to Asian Americans in New York. Growing up as a first-generation Chinese American, Lauren felt “so much pressure to exceed academically.” She explains: “A lot of people think of Asian Americans as a monolith. They excel academically. We live out the American dream. But that's not necessarily true. Especially for what I've seen in Flushing.”

The series is “a celebration of Flushing and all of its service workers,” as well as a celebration of her family. The process “was closure for me,” following the death of her grandma, reaffirming photography as a creative, healing presence in her life. 

When asked how she plans to continue her photography in the future, Lauren seems to have found the balance she was always searching for. “Doing commissions and commodifying your art is just draining. I don’t want to feel forced to take photos.” During last year’s grad season, where she was taking commissions for portraits, her art became her source of disposable income. There was “a lot of pressure to do shoots for money. But because of that, I got so tired of something that used to bring me so much joy. I wondered: is this really worth the trade off?”

Nowadays, Lauren is looking to challenge herself with editing and storytelling. “Now that I know that I'm doing photo projects for myself,” she begins, “I want to go out of my comfort zone.” Her new approach is perhaps best exemplified by her return to portrait photography, taking something that used to feel uninspiring and curating an environment to communicate an artistic intention. “When I look back at them, my grad portraits lacked character.” In her Vivian - 2019 portrait series, she was determined to challenge herself. “I let her do whatever she felt right about. And then, I took artistic control with the location and editing. I enjoyed the shoot so much more.” 

You can find Lauren on Instagram @laurenzhou_ and her portfolio online: https://laurenzhou.myportfolio.com/.