Norman Godinez

October 25, 2023

Feature by Sahai John

Photos by Norman Godinez, as part of their self portrait series: Normans, 2023

Norman Godinez is a senior in Columbia College majoring in English. He is a photographer and filmmaker from Miami. Norman’s work ranges from fashion photography and portraiture to short films and polaroids. He features modern photographs inspired by Baroque and surrealist artists such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Alphonse Mucha. Norman plays with narratives told by authors and artists he admires, telling new stories through his own work.

Norman and I met outside of Shake Shack before walking west to Riverside Park. We found a bench beneath the trees where, a year prior to our interview, early morning sunlight illuminated Norman’s elegantly dressed friend, Alexis, and the surrounding autumn foliage in a shot from his photo series, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa.

Early in our interview, Norman told me that he likes to imagine entering different worlds with his work by encouraging the people he photographs to play a role in the Mucha, Bernini, and Mary Shelly inspired scenes that he builds in each shoot. And, as Norman sat beside me with a red silk scarf tied around his neck and tortoise shell spectacles tucked between the buttons of his black blazer, politely eating a red apple in the slightly overcast park, I couldn’t help but imagine that we, too, were in one of his constructed universes.

Norman enjoys collaborating with his subjects to create these dreamy portraits. “I like for my subjects to have a good narrative in their heads, even if it's not the point of this photograph, even if they're not playing the character that I'm giving them, I still want them to have a character to play.” Norman tells me that he either gives the people he photographs a story or inspiration to follow or he’ll give them explicit directions on where to look and position their bodies throughout the process, conducting his shoots like a film director putting on a production. Either way, he explains, “every time we go into a scene it's almost like an action. That language has always helped me to connect with people that I shoot. Everybody that I've taken pictures of, we come out of the project a lot closer together.”

Norman took me through his creative process by describing the experience of shooting his friend Alexis for The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. “I knew that I wanted to shoot Alexis. That was it. And I remember that Alexis wears a lot of white monochromatic clothing and has a very distinct style. A lot of those pieces are Alexis's clothing and they were inspired by an Alexander McQueen fashion show where there was this kind of heavenly rain happening. That's how I decided to connect it to Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa. And then I shot it somewhere over here [in riverside] at like 7 AM.”

Norman’s earliest memories of exploring photography are from when he was nine years old and took photos on his first camera of his dog who he wrapped in a pink fuzzy blanket like a one-shoulder dress. His skills have since evolved and he now plays with the language of fashion photography while maintaining his own sense of style and humor. Norman hopes to expand his creativity in photography by incorporating themes of nature into his photographs. He explains, “I like nature a lot. I love how powerful and overpowering it can be. I like that a lot of fashion photography has been of pretty people and pretty nature, but I would love to show, in the language of fashion photography, people in crazy environments that might be a little dangerous, like tundras and deserts, to show a little bit of how disconnected we are from the environment.”

Norman described this process of incorporating fashion photography into his work while adding his own aesthetic and meaning as he talked about photographing a friend he met in Paris for his Paris Editorial series. He explained, “I wanted to play with the language of fashion photography. To me, that meant maneuvering through a day in Paris in a really annoying, ‘fashion way.’” Norman played with this language by photographing iconic locations in Paris. He took photos at the Tuileries Garden, the Pont Alexandre III bridge, and the Bouquinistes. “Two or three months ago, during summer, I saw this Richard Avedon show,” Norman told me. “A lot of his fashion photographs were at the exact spots that I photographed, and I had never seen them before. But it was like we both understood the weight of those iconic locations. And I know Richard Avedon might have wanted to use them in a way that was not ironic, but I kind of wanted to poke a little bit of fun.”

Although he takes his work and their subject matters very seriously, Norman includes subtle bits of humor throughout many of his series. This is one of the more playful aspects of Norman’s Alas commercial. “Just thinking, this can be funny, and giving myself the permission to look at the commercial as if it is funny, brings out a lot in it. It's so supernatural,” he says. Norman enjoys exploring the language of advertisement. He’s interested in the way that commercials use elaborate lighting, settings, and costumes to depict a moment that doesn’t exist but is being given to the audience as if it does and is just part of an ordinary day in someone’s life. Making sure that his own commercial was not as disconnected, however, was important to Norman. “The commercial connected art in a lot of different ways, especially really human emotions like laughter, humanity, humor, as opposed to a very elevated, almost detached way, which happens sometimes,” says Norman.

Throughout his work, Norman weaves multiple themes by playing with movement and nature in his photographs. “Maybe, in these contrasting black and white ones, It's eaten up a little bit, but it's still there. In one of those, my subject is hugging the shadow of a tree and then the Paris Editorial has this movement where he's eating an apple. So there are all these nature motifs that I really love, and I think that's what translates as dreamy.”

Through baroque and surrealist inspired settings and costumes, Norman photographs others and himself in these dream-like universes. “Some of my work is inspired directly by an artwork or an artist, and there's been a few times where I recreate them all together.”

Norman enjoys reimagining historic pieces of art while adding his own touch. In a photograph from Norman’s Couple Series, he takes a photo of himself and his boyfriend wrapped in a white sheer piece of fabric as they kiss. The photograph is modeled after the surrealist artist René Magritte’s The Lovers painting. His boyfriend is wearing a pink blazer, similar to the pink dress that the woman in the painting has on. “There's a conversation in that,” says Norman. “With other ones it's just like, ‘let's just do this, let's be in this world.’ So at first, it's about thinking of the aesthetic or the archetype, and then it's just about making it happen.”

Combining historical art with the present times interests Norman and is a recurring theme throughout his works. While Norman appreciates the freedom for self-expression in contemporary art, he believes that historical works still have a lot to offer in today’s art world. “A lot of contemporary art is trying so much to move forward that it's forgetting to include into conversation these really big pieces, and pieces that, as a student, I fixated on and admired so much. Bridging them with today's world is really exciting to me.”

Norman enjoys revealing the inner actor or model inside of each of his friends and other subjects, and watching them transform into the characters that he assigns to them when he takes their photos. “I love seeing people, especially people that are not models or actors, really commit to their role and get a sense of being able to play. In my last film, my boyfriend was so anxious. He kept telling me, ‘you know, I'm not like an actor or anything like that’, so I fed him a lot of the narrative, which was inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. That was the kind of story that I was giving him; picturing that he's Frankenstein in this Gothic school, and he's already created the monster but it's lurking and he doesn't know where the monster is, it creates the sense of anxiety that at any moment, the monster could pass by. My boyfriend really committed to it. At one point he was almost panting, and I loved it. I love seeing people really commit to these fictitious characters and have fun doing so. I liked seeing them after they realized who they became or what they were embodying.”

People’s abilities to create their own worlds and decide how they’re going to present themselves in it sparks Norman’s love for the moment in history in which we live. Norman believes that people, and especially Columbia students, are no longer restricting themselves to binary ideals of the past and this inspires his work. “I'm just inspired by radical people,” Norman tells me. When he first got to Columbia, Norman focused on spending as much time off-campus as he could to try and explore more of New York, but this year, he’s come to appreciate the community and the people on Columbia’s campus. “The kids are cool!” Norman explains. “I'm excited by people doing their own thing and what it looks like today, which is very different. Seeing people lean into their own is really exciting to me. This includes gender, sexuality, self expression. I think gender is a big one, but also just personal aesthetic. I've seen people dress in 70s mod to class for no reason, which I really enjoy.”

In addition to the narrative driven worlds and Baroque inspired scenes that he captures in his photographs, Norman enjoys taking polaroids to capture day-to-day moments. “The reason I love polaroids so much is because I give myself a limit. If I go out with my polaroid it usually has only eight photographs. Sometimes I choose not to bring any more film. So when I’m going on a weekend trip or a week trip I only have eight photographs.” This allows Norman to focus more on waiting for the right moment to present itself, instead of trying to make something happen.

Photography has been and remains Norman’s primary medium. “I just like photography,” he tells me. “I like how it can be meta. There's this series that I’ve been thinking of doing where I would take my own portraits, shooting myself in different time periods. Today, everything is photography, and everything is a digital image. I think that there's a lot of conversation in that, a lot of ways to be really meta about it, which I would love to get into.”

You can find more of Norman’s work: @normin_norman and Norman’s portfolio.

Dan Weitz

October 23, 2023

Feature by Fatima AlAryani

Photos by Frances Cohen and Lauren Zhou

Daniel Weitz is a senior at Columbia College studying music and physics. He is also an American composer of contemporary concert music, jazz, and scores for film. His artistic process principally features a technique called media or inspiration laundering.

The weather is sullen on the day Daniel and I meet for our interview. It is hardly drizzling but the tinge of gray in the sky is overbearing, that point in time when the seasons are both at the brink of a beginning and an end. On my way to Law Bridge—our agreed meeting point—I notice Daniel walking a few steps ahead of me, and I watch quietly as he strides. I wonder… what does a musician listen to in a walk through the rain?

The answer, as Daniel shares once we’ve shared our greetings, is Ms. Lauryn Hill. When I say that I am in the early stages of my Ms. Lauryn Hill (mis)education, Daniel smiles widely—opening the SIPA door, our shelter from the rain—and says, “Lucky.” The care Daniel has for music, for sound, is quietly reinforced.

Daniel towers over me and responds to all of my questions with terrifying clarity. He wears light wash skinny jeans, a white t-shirt, and a plaid flannel shirt. A pair of silver, round earrings, engraved with a highly intricate pattern, hang from his ears.

We head down to the fifth floor of SIPA and find an empty classroom, the interview already subverting all my expectations of order and structure, decidedly characterizing itself for its fluctuation and spontaneity. I feel embarrassed, but Daniel was easy-going, moving with the flow and seeming undisturbed by any interruptions.

We seat ourselves in the windowless classroom, white lights beaming overhead. My iPhone turned upwards, I press the record button on my voice memo app and ask my first question—eyes shifting quickly to my elaborate notes—as I enunciate: “I just want to start with the basics and give you room to introduce yourself. Who are you?”

“My name is Daniel Weitz,” he begins, “and I am a 21-year-old American composer. I primarily do concert music and film scores.”

Daniel is careful to define his work across four themes: birth, becoming, collapse, and destruction. He groups birth and becoming as a singular category, and collapse and destruction as another, but they all appear to exist in a continuum in his music. The themes almost follow a story, the narrative of a protagonist undergoing a bildungsroman. A coming-of-age or lifecycle.

We see this, for example, in Daniel’s composer’s notes for his quintet score Infants of Further Life. A score inspired by the first two stanzas of Muriel Rukeyser’s “A Birth” Daniel writes: “The project of this piece is to sonically invoke Rukeyser’s conception of the relationship that each of us has with our own childhood, with our own vulnerable, naked, uncertain, yet beautiful beginning.

Birth being so thematically central, I find myself curious as to where Daniel’s composer identity was born.

In response, Daniel tells me a story. According to familial lore—lore indeed because he isn’t sure of its authenticity—Daniel’s family was at a dinner party, and in attendance was a family friend who happened to be a professional cellist. At some point that evening, the cellist plays, leaving Daniel utterly mesmerized and desperate to learn the glorious instrument, thereby unfolding his current world.

Growing up near Boston College—at the intersection of Chestnut Hill and Newton—Daniel fell in love with the Western and Romantic canon of music. Anchoring his pre-college education were auditions, competitions, orchestras, chamber groups, and the wholehearted pursuit of becoming a professional cello player.

“I went to The Rivers School for high school, which has a conservatory program embedded in it where 10% of the students are musicians. I was a cellist there, but I also took some composition classes.” Soon, however, the intensity of playing the cello at school and for extracurriculars became overwhelming, and Daniel sought a means for rest and creativity.

“I started playing jazz piano and jazz guitar for fun. Guitar started as a campfire activity and my older brother was a jazz pianist. I was very inspired by him and could borrow his materials.”

What started as reprieve and play soon became a site for self-discovery: “Playing instruments other than the cello exposed me to an ensemble vision where I was playing with harmonies all the time. That made me want to compose a lot, because I had different instruments in my arsenal. And I could see that they played distinct roles.”

But Daniel didn’t start taking composing seriously until he came to Columbia, where he’s now a senior studying music (predictably) and physics (not-so-predictably)!

Physics doesn’t define Daniel’s identity the way music does—he does not call himself a physicist like he calls himself a musician: “The reason I [pursue both music and physics] is not because of their intersection. People say, oh, there's stuff that you can do with acoustics. But I do it for education, not vocation. I really want to study two very disparate things that interpret the world in opposition to each other because it allows me to have a more holistic and robust understanding of it.”

Seldom do I come across individuals whose personal curiosities defined their education path. One of Columbia’s unique characteristics as an educational institution is its pre-professionalism, its “student-to-intern-to-investment banker pipeline,” so it can feel isolating to trek through a not-so-clear career path. Pursuing an art form of any kind as one’s primary vocation in an increasingly capitalist world is daunting.

When I share these sentiments with Daniel, he admits that he experiences these anxieties as well. For him, there’s a limited degree of safety in pursuing physics in addition to music.

“I'm gonna give myself five years to just do music after undergrad and apply to music master’s programs, knowing that I [could return to my physics] degree. If needed, I could apply to physics programs, and maybe make a life for myself there.”

Even with such intense dedication in composition and music, Daniel is still afraid of putting himself in a box, of limiting his possibilities. “Oftentimes, I feel regret… I think I'm wasting so much of my time doing this and that, when I don't even expect to do it professionally. Why am I still playing so much cello? I'm not a performer anymore!

One belief I uphold is that anything in life will make me a better composer. My wider experiences help me as a creative person. All my mentors have taken years off of music to do other, unrelated things. It has made their music better and they’ll self-report that. And it makes a lot of sense to me. So maybe I can trick myself into thinking oh, it's for the craft.”

The words of Henry David Thoreau echo in my ears: “how vain is it to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” To become a better composer, Daniel studies physics, performs in the Columbia Orchestra, in chamber groups, in musical theater shows. Examples of work and dedication that are peripheral yet necessary. “I just can’t live without them. I’ve put myself in these social circles my whole life. It feels really off when I don’t have that experience and don’t connect with its people.”

The shift from performance to composition came to Daniel in a time defined by fluctuation—by birth and destruction—the pandemic: “I realized that so much of my cello playing was social. And so when I was stuck at home alone, practicing, I lost motivation in a way that I didn't expect. Being in a vacuum forced me to confront that I would rather compose.” At a time where performance was rendered impossible, composition—a form of creation that is time-intensive and also transferable via the Internet—became the outlet for human connection Daniel sought.

Daniel’s composition scores read almost like a novel, the narrative aspect reinforced all the way through. Each music score starts with a cover page displaying the title, ensemble, and composer’s name. The next page is the composer’s notes, containing the inspiration for the score—typically poetry—and a message of gratitude. The page before the actual score are notation specifications to guide the musicians.

It’s clear that Daniel puts a lot of effort into his composer’s notes—they read like the preface of a book, ready to welcome you into a journey. The act of composing—I learn—requires more than just a connection to music, but to writing as well.

In Glass’ composer’s note, Daniel includes the self-written poem that first guided the creation of the score. Although he originally had no intention of making it into a musical piece, sound and its diction reverberates all throughout it. Even when Daniel writes a poem, he is conscious of sound, of musicality.

This process of transferring one form of art into another is what Daniel calls inspiration-laundering: “Oftentimes, if I'm tasked to create a piece, I'll listen to something that I really love while doing some sort of art—usually poetry or sculpture. In my mind, I'm a sponge absorbing the emotive human essence from the art I'm listening to. And months later—because then that means I've forgotten the specifics—I can compose based on the art that I created.”

There is a lineage of inspiration that flows from one medium to another, a story outside of the narrative each composition holds, where older creative artifacts are made into a final musical score.

“Though the medium is sonic,” Daniel describes, “the main goal is to create imagery in one's mind. Our minds are very powerful, and they can do that, and not ascribe or prescribe what those images should be.”

There is also an unpredictably and self-governing nature to Daniel’s creative process. He began writing the Infants of Further Life for class without knowing where it was headed. Often, the music dictates to Daniel what his subject matter should be in a way he does not choose. He may approach a piece with singular purpose on one day, and realize that the music is beckoning to be made into something different the very next.

With Infants of Further Life, the piece told Daniel that it was a baby.

It was only upon this realization and further writing that Daniel started looking for poetry about birth to inspire the rest of the piece. “It kind of goes from one to another to another back to the music, so it's not as linear as it sounds. You create modules and then you arrange it in a way that's convincing as linear.”

From there, theories develop about the role of the different instruments about the vibrant world Daniel conjures within the score. “If the clarinet is vocal, and it's whimpering and babbling and singing, then what are the other instruments doing? How do I fit them into the narrative?”

If a piece self-governs itself in Daniel’s work, then who names each piece? “I think about the title of my pieces for a very long time. They are the best articulation of how I am in a certain moment.”

For instance, the title for Infants of Further Life came to Daniel in a moment when he felt like “a child masquerading as an adult,” while Glass was a response to an upsetting situation, making Daniel want “to scream and shatter things.” The name becomes obvious when the narrative and emotions are clear.

However, the process is a little different when it comes to film scores, another manifestation of Daniel’s composition. “I'm very lucky that the student directors that I've worked with have given me a lot of agency; they'll have a loose idea and will use words to describe it. But sometimes, it's hard to use language to describe music if you don't do it all the time. And so their descriptions end up being up to my interpretation as well. When the music is subservient to [a larger film or story], it also opens me up creatively.”

Scoring films can feel liberating, especially when contemporary academia expects young composers to be vanguarding the future. “You must be pushing the envelope in some sort of way to be taken seriously. In a post-modern world, people say that you can make anything and be fine, but in my experience, it doesn't feel to be true.

If you compose pieces in a very certain aesthetic, more doors will open to you. And I actually do love how art music is, and playing that game. But it can also be caging.”

Right now, Daniel is writing a piece called May I Come In? for violin, cello, percussion, drum set, and piano. It’s an interactive piece between musician and instrument, where each musician takes their turn to knock on their instruments—as if knocking on a door—and asking the instrument if anyone is home. “And then people all whisper welcome and play the instruments in these kinds of luscious cascades in a very impressionist sort of way, with instruments inviting you in.”

But beyond concert music created for class and music scores created for student films, what does Daniel’s music sound like when it’s made just for him?

When there’s no ensemble to play his score or an audience gazing upon a silver screen, Daniel returns to sonic meditations—a practice created by American composer Pauline Oliveros. Perhaps he’ll take his cello and play Bach cello suites. Other times, he’ll pick up his guitar and sing (he was listening to Ms. Lauryn Hill earlier that day because he’s trying to cover her).

“They’re good palate cleansers. They bring me back to the live act of creation and listening, which ultimately should anchor everything else you do.”

Watch his video interview:

Seiji Murakami

October 17, 2023

Feature by Julia Tolda

Photos by Amelia Fay

Seiji Murakami’s studio has a folding ladder he rescued from the street. Before the interview began, he placed it between our chairs and asked me to set my phone on it. It’s the perfect spot to record both our voices. This is my first taste of Murakami’s impressive eye for detail, his tendency to look for and find beauty anywhere, and his intuition. As we talk, this becomes clearer and clearer.

Born and raised in Tribeca, senior English and visual arts major Seiji Murakami wanted to stay in his hometown. In our conversation, he beamed that “it all worked out.” Originally at CMU studying art, he transferred to Columbia College for “an experience that felt more informed by other disciplines.” Over the last four years, Murakami noted how all his classes, even those not explicitly related to visual arts, fed into his work.

But Murakami’s love for art began in childhood with his interest in origami. Now Murakami sees how “playing with paper,” and “folding all the time” were formative to his development as an artist. To him, it is obvious: his current work has evolved from and into the after-school activity.

Geometric tessellations were, and still are, his favorite things to make. Repeating fractal patterns permeate his mind, even though he is “not technically folding anymore”. Murakami recounted a piece he had made recently. Working on the floor, cutting and pasting paper together, he intuitively found himself making a hydrangea inspired by Shuzo Fujimoto’s silhouette. “It was against my will,” he added, “almost like it made itself.”

Then, in middle and high school, the study of black and white film photography caught his eye. The realization he “could take pretty good photos and make work that interested [him], reflected [his] experience of the world” was the beginning of Murakami’s understanding of “what it meant to do art and be an artist.” It was this training that taught him “ways to look, to think about what kind of shapes there are in the world, how the camera flattens them, and the importance of light in making and showing work”.

Today Murakami’s interests have expanded to include writing, printmaking, sculpture, and collage. In our conversation, he indicated connections between the mediums. Photography and printmaking, share a relationship to the negative image. Origami propels paper from two-dimensional planes to three-dimensional objects.

As an example, he showed me “Mumur”. It is a large, intricately designed sheet of paper hanging from the wall, something of a cross between a sculpture, a painting, and a collage. From behind the piece, there was a red glow, which Murakami chalks up to its “relationship to the wall”. The sheet is flat, but its reflection on the wall creates depth. And the perception of the piece is reliant on light, much like a photograph.

Murakami’s main interest right now is on how his works can speak to each other, creating an amorphous web of responses and meaning. In their showing together, how is it that the pieces can complicate one another? Pointing at the works displayed around the studio, Murakami went on: “How does this gesture get expanded into another? Or how do the twirls of the fabric complicate the worm paper? How does all that respond to this trim?”

When asked about the connections between art and writing, Murakami talked of the utility he found in this relationship. As he searches for inspiration, Murakami will not only photograph interesting textures but also write about them. Or, as he thinks of a piece, instead of sketching he will write. “You can see it over there,” he tells me, pointing out a stretch of wall completely covered in yellow post-its. Writing is the fastest way Murakami understands his process. “Sometimes the most important thing is just getting something you are thinking down on paper really quickly, and getting that worm out of your head. I’m usually describing the next process or describing the technique. I write to think, to connect my multitude of ideas into a web.”

While writing has not found its way into the work yet, Murakami is interested in trying it out. But that has not been fleshed out, and doesn’t feel intentional at the moment. “I’m thinking of including the post-its of the process back into the work,” he said, “Rewarding the viewer by bringing them closer, letting the words I’ve written act like a lovely treat.”

At Columbia, Murakami felt encouraged to explore his interest in English, mostly because he found reading all different kinds of texts to help form his work.

Anne Carson’s Nox for example, “is all about how the fragmentary arrives to us, and how we have to be satisfied with the information we receive. But she also writes about translation, and the multitude of possibilities. Language is a metaphor for our perspective, every word is a metaphor in some way.”

And Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein influenced his approach to art-making, almost like putting together distant objects into a body. Murakami laughed, “I don't want to say that I'm ‘making the monster,’ but I think there's certainly a fascination with the magic of when these pieces come together, which you didn’t know could be linked, re-made into some larger whole.”

The classical meaning of grotesque came up then, the art style which includes natural, human, and animal forms together. Murakami mentioned specifically the grossness in the works he enjoys, and his fascination with the bodily, the fluid, and the icky. I was reminded of the concept of the “monstrous,” as in, that which cannot be shown, cannot be explained. Murakami agreed. To him, the monstrous is not only linked to Shelley’s monster, but he also thinks of it as a queer body. “I don’t make work that needs to be explained as queer work,” he stated, “it just is.” He recommended the article “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” by Susan Stryker, as an example of this link.

As the artist is brimming with ideas, so is the studio brimming with materials. To Murakami, the work doesn’t seem to start or end, the days flow from one to the next. He will set up a tarp and his stock, “which looks like trash but is not”. Then he will pull out sheets, shape, cut, and rearrange as he goes. Working on the floor allows him to shift the work completely, from vertical to horizontal and vice versa.

Back to Shelley, Murakami mentions the “self-generated momentum” in his studio. “A lot of my old work that I didn’t like ends up making its way back into the new pieces. I cut it up, reshape, and repaste it. It gets processed, digested.” While he feels a kind of hesitancy in pasting, pouring, or tearing things up, Murakami sees how these choices are mediated and influenced by him. And that is how the “value added to [the work] is mine, it will always be linked to me in some way”. The fear of overworking a piece is real, but it excites him. “If something is overworked, I know I can pull it off, cut it up, process it, and reincorporate it.”

Murakami is currently inspired by “the micro and macro, at the same time, on the same medium or the same matrix.” Paper as a craft practice, as a medium of collaboration. Entropy formed patterns found in walks, the slow-motion fight between elements, “the flowing of order, from being brought in to dying out, repeatedly”. NASA archives of cosmic images, and cellular images he observed in Columbia labs.

Reflecting on his years at university, Murakami mentioned how the artists he met at Columbia, at CMU, and outside campus showed him “the value added to any work is you”. “The most important thing,” he shared with me, “is doing what works for you, and believing in what you are making.”

Post-grad, Murakami is excited about not knowing what things he will create, and to try and make art outside the school context. He will be traveling to Japan for a year to make paper, as a Mortimer Hay Brandeis Traveling fellow where he also hopes to train in other mediums like metalwork. “I am excited by processes, and techniques that I don’t know yet and to see how they will change my work.”

Rommel Nunez

May 17, 2023

Feature by Iker Veiga

Photos by Kendall Bartell

Rommel Nunez is a senior studying Computer Science and Film in SEAS as well as the President of Ratrock Magazine. Through his narrative photography and film, Nunez places viewers in the depths of the uncanny valley. His work dares the audience to overcome impossible visual labyrinths and engage in conversations that expand on their own identities. We met in Joe’s Coffee to discuss his musical background, barthesian theory, and the keys to keeping Columbia’s artistic community more alive than ever.

How did you start making art?

I do a lot of music videos nowadays, and I am convinced that all of that comes from my musical background. When I was 12, my parents bought me a $30 acoustic guitar, and that spurred my entire journey into making art. As I moved onto high school, I became really serious about music: I played classical saxophone, and it was the only thing I cared about. In college, however, I couldn't afford to own a saxophone, so I soon started looking for other ways to express myself. This struggle is essentially what motivated me to explore the visual arts.

My friend Gloria is a music producer, and when we were together here during our sophomore year, she would make one minute covers of her favorite songs, and post them on Instagram. I soon started making little music videos for them, and eventually, I ended up doing a longer version of a music video with Christina Li. By now I've made around 12 or 15 music videos in which I explore short film narrative techniques, and it's really exciting! There's a lot to work with when your art is so influenced by music.

What is more important to you when making a music video, coming up with evocative imagery, or focusing on exploring the narrative?

I think this is a big question I had to face when I first started doing this. At first, there weren't any rules. Nobody told me how to direct a music video, how to write a script, or how to come up with an original concept. It all is intuitive to me. Most of the time when coming up with an idea for a video, I sit down with the artist that I'm working with and they play the song for me. Then I close my eyes and focus on the sonic landscape the song evokes. And that's my little nugget – going off of that, the entire narrative starts coming together.

Then I work with index cards: I lay them out and make sure the story is cohesive. I also look at a ton of music videos for weeks to get inspiration. For instance, I worked on this music video by the artist Black Hibiscus for the song If I Cared. It's a song about unrequited love and trying to be with somebody who doesn't even know you exist. But the song has a trippy sonic aesthetic to it, and I wanted to capture that in the video as well. So I drew inspiration from a lot of different artists, – Bonobo, Adele – and what I ended up doing is that at the start of the video, you have this frame in which the artist is laying down on the couch wearing a black suit. And the whole idea is that, in the middle of the frame, you can see the next scene, so you can actually watch all the way through to the end of the clip in the center. And then, by the end, we discovered that he had taken drugs because he was so madly in love that he couldn't just help being by himself. Which is kind of dark, but in a way, a little romantic, you know?

Do you consider your art dark? What's the emotional atmosphere you want to achieve through your work?

Some of my art definitely goes deep into the uncanny valley. Especially my work with film photography and darkroom photography. There’s this photo of my friend Grace, in which her figure is really elongated and it looks very editorial. However, there's a version that I think a lot of people haven't seen, in which I decided to scratch her face off. I took the negative of the picture and stretched her face to make a haunting, alien-esque silhouette. And it's really scary. I'm really interested in exploring how black and white photography can bring out the obscurity behind each subject.

Currently I am working on translating that same aesthetic into my films. But it's really hard to accomplish the same effect in moving images. My college roommate got me into horror, and discovering that genre has affected my work a lot too. For a while, my favorite movie was Alien Covenant. I really admire Ridley Scott’s costume design and world building, he’s one of the best ever to do sci-fi.

However, I also draw inspiration from other film genres. I am fascinated by Roma. I watched it a year and a half ago, and I still think about it a lot. Because of my Mexican identity, I understand it differently: it hits so many beats that only Mexican people understand. When my mom watched it, she was like “Yeah, that's what Roma looked like when I was tiny.” And that tells me that it is a really, really well-made movie: it is informed by history and it reminds viewers of their own personal experience. I want to see more works like that. I want to tell stories that are real, that are diverse, that are something that people will be able to relate to.

Does your Mexican heritage influence your art in any other way?

The question of identity has been pervasive throughout my life. Growing up in high school, I couldn't really tell people that I was from Mexico, because I went to a public American high school when you're not supposed to commute across the border to go to school. I would go to class, be there for 10 hours, come back home to Mexico, do homework, and go to bed by like 10. It was when I started exploring darkroom photography that I first tried to incorporate my Mexican heritage with my work by learning from the work of past Mexican artists. For example, Armando Herrera invented what was essentially the first kind of Photoshop ever. After taking pictures, he would get big glass negatives and scratch the blemishes off the face of his models using a chisel. The results were these very characteristic portraits of the 40s and 50s in which people have beautiful porcelain faces. Thus, he defined the image of an entire generation in Mexico. And that’s what I want to do with my work, I want to be able to create iconic images that people can just look at and think “Oh, that’s Rommel.”

However, a lot of the work I consume isn’t exclusively Mexican, so many different influences filter and mix into my pieces. And that is beautiful. In the end, I'm just concerned with telling good stories–stories that ring true to the people I'm concerned with. I want to use my art to learn more about different cultures, especially Latin American cultures. I know Mexico really well. But I want to have cultural conversations with people in Ecuador, people in Venezuela… I hope that, through my art, I will at least help other people see themselves represented on the screen.

How do you reconcile storytelling and self-expression in your work?

When I write, the first thing that I focus on is character building. The best stories are stories in which the characters have a deep, embedded background. Through my creative process, I want to create real people. So I sit down, I open up a document, and I write three or four pages about who each character is, what they look like, how tall they are, what their skin color is, where they're from–all these questions that seem so stupid and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Once you start writing a narrative, there is so much that you cannot tell in an under seven minutes short film that has to come out through subtext.

Nevertheless, that subtext is informed by the writer's history–my background. The big question that I've been struggling with as I write is “when am I writing about myself? When are characters influenced by my own experience?” Some of the characters I have written are Mexican, some of them are Colombian, some of them are my height, some of them love caffeine, some of them hate caffeine. All the small, stupid things about one’s life end up informing one’s characters. That is why there's so many people in my stories that are inverted versions of who I am and everything that I stand for. And that's fun. It's a big way of examining who you are, and diving deep into your own personal agenda.

Besides character development, what is your favorite part of the art-making process?

I have interacted with every part of the process because when you're starting off, you have to be really scrappy, and you don't have money to pay other people (asking for free labor doesn't feel right to me.) My favorite part, however, is being on set with people, especially when I am filming videos. I love the energy after setting up a good shot, cutting, and then having everybody in the room knowing that it looks fantastic.

I also love post processing in photography. The set-up of a picture is only 50% of a final image, because when you go back home, you have to edit it, get some cool colors out of it, and add different effects that will make the image look more impressive.

But I would say, I feel the most rewarded when I'm using a film camera. Because you never know what the image actually looks like through a screen – you have to use your intuition. You need to set up lights correctly, you have to get the right exposure… So it's just an amazing feeling to know that the image is solid when so many things could go wrong. In the past, I've shot entire rolls of film that were put on incorrectly, and I just didn't get any images from that, which sucks. But you live, you learn and when the images do turn out, it feels incredible, especially once you see people’s reactions to them.

What would you like your audience to experience when viewing your work?

I've been thinking about what I want my audience to experience when viewing my work a lot recently. I talk a lot about that with my friend Kate Miller, who is also my production designer in a lot of projects and a great artist herself–and we have started to realize that the best art is that which asks questions, it's an art that is kind of confusing. For example, I recently watched Tár, and it blew my mind. At the end of the movie, I couldn’t stop asking myself, should I feel bad for her? I really don't know. And I think that's what made it a really good movie, that it requires you to reconcile yourself with the artwork. Even though I'm always trying to reach an ideal punctum in my work, I think that it can live alongside a piece that invites a reader to dig deeper into them.

Can you tell us more about the punctum?

Barthes wrote a lot about this, we talked about it in my darkroom class last semester. According to him, there is a certain essence to a photograph that comes out only once the image has been displayed to the person looking at it. And it's debated whether that essence–that punctum–is built by the photographer, or if it's just a quality that pops out naturally from the image. And that annoys me a lot.

It's incredibly frustrating to me, because I like being in control, but people say that the punctum cannot be fabricated. I think I should be able to say what I want to say through my images because I construct them so intricately. And it's truly stupid to think that the way that the intention you create art with will be perceived by viewers without alterations. But the punctum complicates all of this even more. It is something we all chase: that accidental, impactful quality that enables people to viscerally relate to an image. And that's where the conflict in my work comes from: it's a race that I'm trying to win all the time. If I can achieve the punctum in three photographs in a row, I'll be happy. Because that means that I am figuring something out and getting closer to the core of photography.

Lastly, what are your thoughts on the artistic community at Columbia, both as a film student and as the President of Ratrock?

The first two years of my time here, I was really confused, because there were not that many creative people in my close circle. Sadly, there is a part of the Columbia experience that is about exclusion. I mean, clubs are literally exclusive groups of friends. Because of this, I think over sophomore, junior, and especially senior year, when I took over Ratrock, I wanted to foster a bigger, more inclusive community – I wanted people to feel like there truly was a space for them in this school. We have done that through different events, like the monthly general body meetings or the gallery shows that we have organized in ADP. That way we get to hang out as friends afterwards. Funny enough, I actually remember one time the Ratrock board was in a meeting, and I said “This is really fun, we should hang out as friends later.” And I said that because, I mean, even though Ratrock is a friends club, it still felt like a job for me sometimes, because I truly care so much about the mission. But it turns out that behind the scenes, everybody else felt like we were already hanging out as friends.

Everybody loves Ratrock!

You are biased, but I am happy people are making a lot of friends. What I want to leave to Columbia is this community of artists. Even if you are not one, the experience of having art around you is so important to a happy existence. It permeates your life, how you dress, and how you talk to people. It is ridiculous how much I have been influenced by art. The more people realize that, the better their lives will be.

Thank you for talking with us today! Where can the Ratrock readers find your art?

You can check my website out, and also my instagram is @rommelnunezg. I am also currently working on a short film about one of Alan Turing’s experiments, and am really excited for it to come together! Definitely check it out when it is out there. And please, hit me up for a job in film production after graduation, I am happy to help!

August Cao

May 16, 2023

Feature by Nora Cazenave

Photos by Frances Cohen

August Cao is a queer, Asian American writer and photographer from Chicago who looks for liberation in space, light, people, words, and time. They explore these themes through portraiture, street photography, and nonfiction writing, and will graduate from CC this spring, class of 2023, with a major in Creative Writing.

How did your journey as an artist begin? Did you start with writing or photography?

I’ve always had dreams of being a writer. I can’t believe I’m admitting it on tape, but I used to write fanfiction in middle school, which is where it started. I went to an arts high school, studied creative writing for four years, and then got to college and decided to study more creative writing, because I'm insane, I guess. My sophomore year I took a nonfiction writing class that changed my life. I thought “Wow, I can write about my life and be self absorbed. I love this.”

This process forced me to unpack and reflect on the life I was living, and the people I was living it with. It wasn't until recently that I had the courage to express myself, my feelings, and my thoughts verbally. I was always able to find that courage through writing; my voice just had to catch up.

How does photography fit in?

In high school I experimented with vlogs, which is why I first got a camera. Eventually, that turned into me wanting to take pictures. I took a lot of pictures of friends, which again evolved into my interest in street photography.

I write from a very observational and subjective point of view, because I don’t think writing can be objective. But both my photography and my writing reflect the ways I absorb the world. Photography is the visual component to the internal monologues I write.

So writing and photography are sort of two sides of the same coin for you?

They definitely are. They use different parts of my brain, but they both have the same end goal of capturing the world through my lens, which you probably hear from a lot of photographers and writers. But it's true, because all of us see the world differently.

In your artist statement, you talk about trying to capture stillness in your photography.

My head is constantly running at 500 miles per hour. Writing allows me to sit down and meditate, to figure out what's going on with this constant circling happening in my head. With photography, it's like I'm seeing the world in frames, instead of in a blur. Growing up in big cities, everywhere is busy and constantly moving. Especially in the US, we all have this idea of cities constantly going, going, going. Photography allows me to sit in the moment. It allows me to enjoy the simplicity of how light hits a certain way, how architecture moves, or how things are built around each other. I would never have been able to see that stillness if it weren't for photography and writing.

You mentioned the constant movement of living in a big city. I'd love to hear about your experience growing up in Chicago, because it seems like a big source of inspiration for you.

I love Chicago, I ride or die for Chicago. I see myself moving back there and settling down one day. There are a lot of people there that I consider home. I've grown into myself a lot since moving to New York, but I just fit into Chicago like a puzzle piece.

This past summer, I explored places I had never been before, even though I lived there all my life. I think this speaks to a very big problem of Chicago’s systemic segregation. People stay in their neighborhoods. I had the sort of privilege of going to a high school that wasn't in my neighborhood, which allowed me to see places and neighborhoods that my parents and brother still haven't seen, to this day.

No matter where you go in the city, there is something beautiful about it. Part of it is because of how money and politics divide the space, and it’s crazy to see the duality of skyscrapers and fenced-off or abandoned spaces. There’s merit in being able to photograph my city, the place I grew up in, as an outsider, because I’ve been able to readjust my perspective on things I used to see as mundane. All of it is so beautiful, and I cherish every memory that I have in Chicago. I could live in New York for the rest of my life and would still consider Chicago my home, despite everything I went through growing up there.

What kind of things did you go through?

I grew up in Chinatown, and I think my queerness caused a rift in how I could relate to a lot of people that looked like me ethnically. In my high school, there were very few people that looked like me. A lot of the students were queer, so they felt like me in terms of their queerness, but they didn't look like me. That was an interesting dynamic. I also struggled communicating with my parents because there was a cultural and language barrier. We're working on that now, which is really great, but that wasn’t always the case. There are a lot of things that happened that sucked in the moment, but shaped me into the person I am today. My art, the way I live currently, and the way I carry myself wouldn't have happened if it weren’t for those formative years in Chicago.

It seems to be a theme in a lot of your photography that you take photos of people you care about. Can you talk about the importance of these emotional connections in your work?

The only reason I have an ounce of photography talent is because I was able to practice capturing moments with my friends. At the end of the day, I value my friendships above making art. I've been reading All About Love, and it beautifully articulates my outlook on community. For most of my life I've had to build my own community. I went to a high school with all new people, so I was meeting people for the first time and made long lasting friendships there. It was the same when I came to Columbia—I knew no one.

All of these stages in my life that were important to my development as a person and an artist came with really intentional community building. Honestly, if I didn't have these communities, I would have called quits on a lot of things. It’s because of my friends that are like, “I believe in what you can do, and I believe that you can go bigger and better” that I keep striving for bigger and better things.

When you are taking photos of people that you don't already have that connection with, how does trying to create that connection, or getting to know them, factor into your process?

I've done a lot of freelance work, and I've worked with a lot of people I've never met before where my first time meeting them was literally on the street in Soho or Times Square, which is wild to think about. But I treat these people like friends. I'll ask them how their day is, what their aspirations are, what they plan on doing in the future, where they’re from… I value learning about them more than forcing them to pose in a certain way that will get the best light or will get them “the shot.” They’re not going to feel comfortable with a stranger just holding a camera in front of them.

Can you talk more about your creative process—whatever that means to you?

A lot of the portraits I take are spontaneous. I only recently started doing really planned shoots, so a lot of my more creative shoots are with friends. When I'm doing photos for clients, the creative process starts with taking a few preliminary shots to make sure that it looks good, and then just following them through the day. And then getting them in their element and maybe posing them. But I'm also talking to them and laughing with them, telling jokes, hearing about their day, what they do for a living…

A lot of them I don't ever see again, but I carry their stories with me. I don't remember all of them, I will say—I have a really bad memory. But there are a lot of people out there that have a story and just don't know they want to share it. That vulnerability shows in the photography. You can see it in the way they’re smiling and the way they're posing—there is a sense of connection in the photos because there's a connection between the photographer and the subject.

What does that creative process look like when you’re writing?

It’s almost the complete opposite. Writing is a lot more intimate. That's where I think that these two forms diverge. I prefer writing alone. If people are around me, I won’t talk to them until I'm done with something. Writing is also a really time consuming process, so it is a lot of sleepless nights. I feel like Taylor Swift saying that—“sleepless nights.” A lot of the creative writing I'm doing right now is for classes. Once I graduate, I see myself dedicating time in my day to writing, and writing down my thoughts as they come.

As an artist and a student, what has your experience been like at Columbia—the good and the bad?

The good is that I’ve met a lot of people that are also into art. It's been helpful knowing that I'm not alone in this journey toward artistry. The bad is that I have a lot of ideas that I’ve had to put to the side, which will hopefully change once I graduate. Hopefully I don’t put it off and let go of my artistry once I leave Columbia. That’d be really sad.

Tell me more about your own bad memory, and your use of photography to capture memories.

I've had to find ways to remedy my bad memory. It’s really about saying, okay, this is what I'm working with, what can I do, not to fix it, but to compliment it? Taking photos makes me stop for a moment to think, so some of the Polaroids on my wall were taken two years ago, and I can still tell you their story. I journal and photograph almost every day so I can remember what I was feeling at a certain moment, or look at a photograph and remember what happened that day. There’s something beautiful about having something ingrained in a physical space when my mental space fails me.

Many of your portraits feel very celebratory and colorful. Is that an intentional part of how you try to capture queerness in your photography?

Even from a young age, I’ve never looked the part of being a little cishet. It didn't take me a lot of time to be comfortable in it, but it did take me a lot of time to be able to celebrate it. Being in community with so many other queer folks and people that are loud and proud about who they are helped me be loud and proud about myself. There is this problem in photography where we like to capture struggle, but we rarely like to capture celebration. And I'm very big on celebration, which is why I care a lot about capturing my friends in the way that they feel most beautiful. I want to make sure people feel their best, because I think that a part of queerness is being fully yourself in the most authentic way. For a lot of my friends, that means being able to wear what they want, express themselves the way they want, pose the way they want, and not have someone tell them how their queerness should be cemented or how they should present themselves.

Do you have other artistic inspirations?

There are a lot of people I look up to who are making the kind of art that I always aspire to make—art that’s authentic to the person that's making it, authentic to the communities they are trying to represent, authentic to themselves, and authentic to their audience.

Talk more about the importance of authenticity in your work!

Authenticity is being true to yourself. Sometimes your photographs are inspired by other people, which is fine. Sometimes your writing is going to sound like someone else, and it's fine. You make art that matters to you, even if it’s heavily influenced by other people. That matters more to me than uniqueness. Authenticity doesn’t require you to be different from everyone else. Sometimes authenticity is being just like everyone else, and that's fine!

Can you tell me about your tattoos?

Tattoo artists are also a big inspiration for me. I see it as having art on your body—I'm very big on “my body is a canvas” type shit. I really enjoy the way that people play with colors and compose something all together. I like silly, dumb tattoos; I don't see a purpose in them having a lot of meaning because meaning changes over time. Tattoos have made me feel a lot more liberated in myself and my body because I’ve struggled a lot in the past with my self image, which I figured out was gender dysphoria. But I worked it out and it’s led me to be able to really not give a fuck about what I put on my body.

Is there anything else you want people to know?

The only advice I would give to other people is to let yourself be celebrated. For the longest time, I never wanted to share my art. I literally had a catfish photography account at one point because I didn't want to share art under my name, I was so embarrassed that I was even taking photos. I still barely share my writing. There’s a lot of self doubt, especially in a place that’s so crowded with other artists. But you deserve to be celebrated.

I think everyone is an artist in their own respect. You shouldn't need to subscribe to a certain kind of art or a certain kind of photography or a certain kind of writing in order to feel celebrated. Your people will find you, just like I found the people that I know will support me until the earth falls apart and is taken over by a zombie apocalypse.

“I imagine my father on our rooftop, from the makeshift door he carved out from a window during the summer. Green onion plants in plastic containers of soil. The breeze blows against the wet clothes hung up on the makeshift clothes rack. Random items scattered across the black, flat, rubber roof. All the items I have lost track of hundreds of miles away. My father sits outside on the roof and meditates away from our family. He spends his hours there when he is not sitting in bed watching videos and driving to buy groceries.”

Excerpt from Untitled, originally published in Silk Club's QUIET 06 Zine.

Check out more of August’s work on their website, augustisloading.com, and @digitally.augusts or @augustisloading on instagram.

Warren McCombs

April 29, 2023

Feature by Stuart Beal

Photos by Adela Schwartz

Warren McCombs is a senior visual-arts major from Greenland, Arkansas, who makes sculptures and performance art. We met twice, discussing his current and past work, New York City, and home.

We approach Schermerhorn and it’s raining.

I say that I hope the building is open, not because I don’t want to pick another location for the interview, or because I don’t want to be out in the rain, but because sometimes, when you first meet someone, you make inane comments to fill the empty space–or at least I do.

He responds immediately, saying that Schermerhorn is open 24/7.

And so there I am, tapping my ID and opening the door, not five minutes after meeting him for the first time, imagining him walking through the hallways of Schermerhorn in the middle of the night, probably in elaborate footwear: cowboy boots, heels; he dresses extravagantly, and well.

The first thing I learn about Warren McCombs is that he is the type of person to wander around buildings late at night, keeping track of which ones will allow him such a pleasure, and which won’t.

The last thing I learn about Warren McCombs involves an 1,800-pound block of concrete on furniture dollies barreling down a steep section of Broadway.

Warren McCombs is a senior visual-arts major from Greenland, Arkansas. It’s a town defined by proximity, just outside of Fayetteville. I feel a sense of kinship with him, being from a small town in Texas myself, and when I ask him what the South means to him, how he relates to it, if he relates to it at all, he answers simply: “I like where I'm from a whole hell of a lot better than I like here.”

To the extent that these words sound negative, they aren’t. Or, maybe they are, but not in the way that they seem. McCombs doesn’t hate things for the sport of it. When I try to relate to him by bringing up the cattiness that sometimes seeks to define creative writing workshops, and that I thought would be similarly present in visual arts workshops, he doesn’t take the bait. “I don't think I've ever talked shit about somebody's art behind their back.” I certainly can’t say the same.

This type of honesty defines the conversations I have with him. When you speak to him, he pays attention. And when he speaks to you, there is no sheen of performance or presentation. I’m sure many artists have claimed to have never said something cruel about another person’s art. I’m also sure many of them were lying, in the same way I’m sure that McCombs isn’t.

His main reason for preferring Arkansas over New York City: space. Artmaking is a very physical experience for him, requiring him to pace and move around a lot, and he feels like he can’t do that here.

Despite this constraint, being in New York City has influenced his work. The most formative piece of art he’s made during his time at Columbia is "Oh my goodness, my brother, are you gonna be alright?", a performance piece in which McCombs recorded a time-lapse of himself walking the entire length of Broadway barefoot, taking 5 hours to cover the 14 miles. The project, which started as a test of his endurance, ended with a focus on how others reacted to him. The only person on the street that said a word to him was Cornel West, who happened to be walking by.

“He gestures to my feet, and he says, ‘Oh, my goodness, my brother. Are you going to be alright?’ And he puts his hand on my shoulder and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I'll be fine. I'll be fine. Thank you so much.’”

Another piece he made while at Columbia is entitled “Wunderkammer,” which translates from German to “cabinet of curiosities.” Besides the plywood receptacle, the sculpture is made entirely of objects McCombs found on the street during a single walk through Harlem: a brass handle, food scraps, an old metal washer.

Still, if I was tasked with making a list of things that might be occupying his mind during his late-night jaunts around campus buildings, New York would make the list, along with the prospect of him leaving it.

He’s looking forward to graduation. He has a slight Arkansas accent, and he’s afraid of losing it. I was nervous going into the interview. Within minutes, I wasn’t anymore. If he saw someone else walking barefoot down Broadway, I have complete confidence that he would stop. He spoke carefully throughout our conversations, letting the silence hang, which I quickly got used to. He was especially well-spoken when it came to New York City, communicating a sentiment I know I’ve felt being here, and that I suspect many others have felt too.

“When it’s cold, it feels hot here, and even when it’s quiet here, it still feels loud. It's like the people are just making it feel like a way that it isn't. I don't know. I don't know how to describe it. I feel like I've never been cold here.”

One of the sculptures he’s working on right now has a concrete base that he’s embedded dumbbells and a metal rod into. From this metal rod hangs a microwave.

Another current project of his is a sculpture that attempts to deceive the viewer. He constructed a scale and plans to put something that appears to be very heavy on one side and something that appears to be very light on the other, but have them balance each other by hiding weights in the side of the scale holding the lighter object.

McCombs doesn’t have explanations for why he makes the things he makes.

“When we do critiques, people will ask, what are you trying to do with this? What made you want to do this? And I mean, much to the frustration of many of my professors, I always answer, ‘I don't know.’ It often gets a laugh, but then I'm like, no, I'm serious. I really don't know.”

For McCombs, this intrinsic, unexplainable desire to make art operates differently in Arkansas than it does in New York City. In New York, he finds himself being slightly more avoidant, turning away from certain emotions or fears.

“I feel so much more free to make anything in Arkansas for some reason and I don't know why.”

The project he’s most proud of dates back to Arkansas. It’s a sculpture called “Scrap,” the second sculpture he ever made. It’s a stack of ten or eleven miniature cars he made, each representative of a car that played some role in his life.

“It’s sort of this homage to a childhood in an area around so much junk, and so many junk vehicles, in particular.”

During our conversations, the brightest details he gives are the ones from Arkansas. He grows watermelons in his backyard every summer, massive ones. He spent time as a kid trying to break obscure world records and claims he did break the record for the highest unsupported stack of pennies, but never got it certified.

One of my friends once said she thinks all artists are nostalgic. I think she’s right. I also think that nostalgia is a kind of wandering, a wandering that everyone needs to do in order to be alive, but a wandering that few people have the guts for.

At the top of the previously mentioned list of things I think McCombs might be thinking about while walking down Schermerhorn hallways in the middle of the night: Arkansas.

In October, a massive chunk of concrete broke off the Columbia Law School building, Jerome L. Green Hall, and was placed in front of Wien. McCombs considered trying to move it and do something with it, but he hesitated. Eventually, the university took it somewhere else. What held him back were his concerns about what could go wrong if he tried to transport it.

“You got an 1800 pound block of concrete on some furniture dollies and say you're kind of taking it down a steeper part of the street and it starts rolling a lot faster than you think it might. All of a sudden, you know, it's like smashing into a car or something…”

This anecdote captures what it felt like hearing Warren talk about Arkansas and New York City. He’s in this city with a massive thing in his hands–his life, Arkansas–and it has the capacity to so easily get away from him and create something dangerous–a version of him who disregards where he’s from, who’s perpetually unmoored, pastless.

I think letting go is, in some ways, inevitable. But I think a lot of people give up before they should. And I think nostalgia is a surefire way to hold on tight.

McCombs has a much stronger hold than most.

Cat Luo

April 29, 2023

Feature by Korrin Lee

Photos by August Cao

Cat Luo (they/she) is a senior in Columbia College majoring in Visual Arts and Creative Writing. Cat’s work traverses several mediums such as traditional painting, ceramic sculpture, and printmaking. Their work explores alienation and isolation as it relates to the femme queer body in uncanny yet uncomfortably familiar domestic spaces. Home is a concept for her, a psychological space, and their work aims to capture and recreate psychological spaces of distortion and absurdity. Shit gets weird as a second generation queer Asian American in the US and Cat hopes to find solace in being an alien, a foreigner, in environments that are meant to be familiar or comforting.

How does your vision affect your work? Does it affect how you see color and conceptualize contrast and composition?

I remember being in these art classes and my teachers asked, “Why do you make these stylistic choices? Why do you have such high contrast? Why do you choose such bright colors? And why do you have fingers with super smooth skin?” and at the time I didn’t know why. Thinking more about it, I do have a history of visual impairment; I was born with congenital cataracts and so my vision is 20/30 or 20/40 with contacts– but without them I am legally blind. Which is pretty cute. Very blurry. Because of that, the few things that end up catching the attention of my very overstimulated eyes are really shiny or hard-to-miss.

I really love architecture, and a professor once said that my paintings are very sculptural. The way that this manifests in my art is with the sharp transitions, sharp edges, contrast, really stark colors that catch your attention. The way this translates to my ceramic work makes a lot of sense—I’ve always imagined painting as touching the edge of something. It’s a very flowy kind of movement. And I found myself thinking, why don’t I just go to clay? Clay is literally making it and it’s really satisfying. It’s ASMR for my eyes that work too hard during the day.

Korrin Lee: Our eyes work way too hard actually. Everything is so overstimulating all the time!!

When I was looking at your art, I felt like there was a sense of entanglement in some of your work—more like self-entanglement, like the body is running into itself. Would you say that’s a theme in your work? Does it translate in any way to your recent ceramic work?

Cat Luo: Entanglement isn’t a term I’ve thought about but it makes a lot of sense. Ironically, as an artist a lot of people in my family see me as this hyper-individualistic person, but how am I supposed to understand other people without understanding myself? I’ve always tried to understand what the hell is going on in my brain and how I fit into the meatbag avatar that is my body. I think that forever self questioning or self entanglement is something that I am working through in my art but I don't think there's an answer or end to it. It is forever fun to stare in the mirror and be like Who am i? To always question your identity.

I think it’s a lot easier in my current body of work to express this sentiment because a lot of it is these distorted figures—a leg going into a torso, the torso turning into an arm and this sense of being lost and confused with yourself. All of these paintings and ceramic pieces are posed very intentionally by me; there’s almost an acceptance or meditation of this self-entanglement and being forever twisted up within myself, this messy ball of limbs that is kind of pretty and that’s how it’s gonna be forever until I smash it or something

K: You’ve said before that the body feels very alien. I feel like a lot of the bodies that are represented in your work appear to be very different than what viewers might expect - especially given clay is your medium of choice. That also ties in to your earlier mention of how malleability is so important when working with clay – so how does that idea of malleability apply to your depictions of the body across all your mediums? Is the body something that you see as a playground?

C: This painting [pictured above, DreamGirlX] I had a lot of fun with, it’s very different from some of my other work that is very close to the human body. At the time I was obsessed with ribs and I wanted to make their waist so skinny that it's insect-like. There's something playful about it, but oftentimes, I feel like I'm wrestling with a piece because I just take so much care to make these perfect curves.

On the theme of alienation, I think the term ‘alien’ itself is crazy, like how in legal documents anyone who is not a US citizen is an alien. I’m not from outer space! I’m not going to eat you I promise!!

I grew up in a very white area and a lot of that experience was characterized by me wondering, you know, why are people looking at me weird? Growing up I thought something was wrong or different about me and just felt like a big sore thumb– sticking out in a way I can’t quite explain. My work is an exaggeration of these feelings, of being both scrutinized and not seeing why, which are encapsulated in alienation, which then talks to isolation. It seems like everyone is scared of being lonely, which I find funny because my paintings are almost exclusively one figure. Because these are posed and because I enjoy painting these figures so much, there has to be a sort of joy in sitting in all of these complicated feelings by yourself.

K: Right? If you can't sit with conflict, then I don't know what you're gonna do with your entire life. I really like that idea of sitting with confusion because there are always going to be contradictions within yourself, so much to work through. The way I’m visualizing it is like a rope course that you’re trapped in, trying to untangle the knots but it takes a while, so you get comfortable.

I think you have already touched on this with your comments on alienation and isolation, but what would you say your muse is? Or rather, what would be a motivating force behind your work? From the sense you have given me, I think it has a lot to do with the self, entanglement, etc?

C: We’ve talked about the body and self-entanglement, and I think gender is also a big part of that. Sometimes there's no actual signifier that these figures are femme, but that identity seems to be projected on my art often. A lot of my paintings are a redefinition of what femininity and the queer identity are, both personally and publicly.
I wasn’t very feminine growing up. I mean, now, I don't even have hair. I don't think most of these people in my paintings have hair either. Because I think long hair is a signifier of femininity, and I kind of hate that, because it's so arbitrary and hard to take care of–-why would I put in this work for something that doesn’t represent me in any way or bring me joy?

In my own representations of femininity, gender being a performance is very important. Presenting your art is a performance, and recently I was meditating on that and my paintings, which are all very posed. They’re all looking at you and not in a way that makes you feel comfortable. There’s something very powerful about knowing you’re being viewed and handling that viewership as someone who is femme.

K: My mind goes to a conversation I had this summer (it will connect, don’t worry) about the feminization of translation; often a translated work is seen as unfaithful to the original, you know, like it’s missing something that the translator cannot capture, there’s a degree of distrust there. So, the original work is seen as more authentic and the translated work is inferior. Thinking about this in terms of art, I feel as though certain techniques and color palettes are also feminized inadvertently because they are seen as being tied to a translated version of reality. Because of the bright color palette you use, and your tendency to portray these more “feminine”, alien, surreal and vibrant landscapes, Do you think these ideas have any affect on your art and how it's perceived?

C: I really dislike when people describe my art as sci-fi or fantasy because that’s not what it is. I also think that a more earthy, modernist color palette is taken more seriously, it’s very “masculine” or real or gritty, as opposed to more vibrant colors which I feel are seen as childish, but that’s what excites me. I do often feel like my color palette is not taken seriously.

It’s a bit funny because I feel like usually people who paint really bright colors are from warmer areas. I’m thinking of Carlos Sanchez-Tata who is from Venezuela, where it’s warm and beautiful with so much greenery and wildlife. And then me, I grew up in the suburbs and I’ve come to imagine this luscious kind of space where a different sort of life could exist that is not foggy sad suburbia. I feel like there’s something very extreme about my art, but also life is hard, so I’m going to have extreme fun in my paintings

[ K: Right, like why limit yourself to boring realism? ]

Concerning the body, I used to do a lot of portraiture with the traditional portrait set up (with bright colors of course) and I’ve started to move away from that because I think once you invoke such a specificity of someone's face, someone's identity, there's less freedom for me to be talking about these abstract things. Even in my bigger paintings, I've been moving away from faces or obscuring faces in a way where I feel I have more freedom to express more universal feelings, like alienation and isolation. You're not distracted by trying to identify who this is. drawing faces.

K: Yeah, I feel the alien aspect takes away the first part of figuring out what you’re seeing; whenever you see someone’s face your brain wants to categorize them, but these alien figures are beyond categorization, they’re not something that can be shown in real life, it just lives in your brain

How do you think your identity as a queer, second-generation, asian-american person manifests in your work? In what ways do you want your identity to be articulated in your work?

C: One anecdote I want to share in this interview was that last semester in senior thesis, you have to write an artist statement. And mine was, “I want to make Asian American queer art” and that's how most people talk about their identity and art, but I think it's weird to tokenize or label yourself in such a way.

It is really hard for me specifically to portray the Asian American identity because– what am I going to do? A lot of the Asian American artists that I love, like Sasha Gordon and Amanda Ba, the only way their art is read as Asian American is because they do self portraiture.

I had a teacher who said to me “your art is Asian-American and queer, but it doesn't come across to me” and I thought, "You're an old white lady. Of course, you’re not gonna understand”.

But I feel other people can see my work and resonate with it, or at least see how it came to be out of a marginalized experience. And I think that's enough for me. It's impossible to not have my Asian American experience bleed into my work–it's already there. So I'm not gonna argue with my professor anymore about that. That was annoying; I'm not trying to serve my identity on a platter. Thinking about who my art is for, it’s for me primarily, and people who share my experiences.

[K: In my experience, going to this school means constantly being gaslighted by the institution about your identity and ideas, and it sucks really bad and no one tells you.]

And with my work, I’m not painting my face so there’s no way to really know—and I realized that I don’t want to be so in your face about it. I’m trying to express the experience of being queer and Asian-American, you know, the psychological spaces where everything is a bit absurd. And then there’s also the theme of alienation, like not belonging but at the same time, I have to build a home in my body, I have to get comfortable with being an alien.

Victoria Reshetnikov

April 29, 2023

Feature by Sahai John

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

Victoria Reshetnikov is a junior at Columbia College studying art history and visual arts. She is a multimedia artist born and raised in Queens, NY. Through her creative use of architectural sculptures, isometric prints and imaginative sketches, Victoria explores ideas of home and trauma. Victoria and I met in the Columbia print shop to discuss housing displacement, thrift culture, and what it means to continuously occupy an interior when living in New York City.

When did you first start creating art?

In kindergarten I got my first sketchbook. It's been a mainstay ever since. I really can't imagine my life without it. Growing up I was sort of the village babysitter. I made comic books and exquisite corpses with the kids.

I was always drawing in middle school, but in high school I started getting more into my studies and became more anxious which meant I had less time to do art. I came into this school wanting to pursue academics more, and now I've bounced back into visual arts, and I'm trying to embrace it. I'll see where it takes me.

Where do you draw the majority of your inspiration from?

I am trying to exist in spaces with a lot of clarity now by being more aware of my surroundings. My work has been very architectural recently and the inspiration, because of that, is all around us.

How does living in New York City influence your work?

Becoming an adult in New York has been really stressful recently. As I’m facing graduating and losing the structure of school to frame my life, the housing crisis in New York is becoming much closer to me and feels more absurd. I’ve been very aware of it in the last few years, but I think there’s always been this sense of change in my life. The neighborhoods and places I occupy have been morphing and actively changing. I've embraced this change in my work recently.

I’ve been thinking about Flushing and Long Island City where they now have these circles of glass around the areas. It angers me so much. There's a lot of nostalgia tied to these places for me. But it's so much more than that because gentrification is upending entire lives and homes. I critique it in my work by thinking about the language of urban displacement through architectural plans and isometric drawings.

In a recent project, I used a lot of isometric perspective because those are the plans that we see on the sides of development projects where you have this image of the future home being presented in a super graphic, linear form. I was also thinking about gentrification in that project as something that occurs over time. And I was trying to equate it with the growth of mold and other organic growth, something that is also an agent of time. The project is juxtaposing the way that buildings and the city change to natural growth processes.

How has Columbia influenced your art career?

Last spring semester was so inspiring. I took a scientific illustration class and a class on zines.

I took the scientific illustration class, because I wanted to learn technical skills related to illustration. I left the classroom with a whole different view of everything. I started thinking on a smaller scale about homes and architecture. This semester, all of my classes are Interplay. It’s all really informing my practice, which I love.

Does your work center more often around other subjects? Or yourself?

Every art practice is person-centric. I've been thinking about the house, the home, and the city as indicative of the individual; how our personhood manifests in physical space. My work has geared toward this and the way that objects, things, and items can paint a portrait of other people.

I created a Zine last year that includes an illustration of a thrift store and the way that it fashions identity. I see the second-hand store as an inherently queer space. It forms identity just by existing. There's a lot of creative liberty in the second hand, which I've been interested in.

What artists inspire you and influence your work?

Martha Rosler had an installation piece at the MoMA. She set up this thrift store in a gallery and people would come and buy things. She would be there for the duration of the show, bartering with people, it was so cool. That inspired my zine and the illustration of a thrift store.

I also love Pierre Huyghe. He created this amazing installation called After A Life Ahead where he took an abandoned ice skating rink and dug out caverns in the floor, creating a topographical landscape in which he put streams, rivers and different plant life that would grow over the course of the exhibition. It was super weird and amazing. That also influenced my interest in the changing environments around us which I explore in my work.

How do you think your work has shifted as you've evolved as an artist?

The work that I did in high school was super different from what I'm doing now. I went to a school that had a wonderful art program. But I’m relieved that it wasn't an art high school. My school had a very cobbling art environment where we just made art for the sake of making art.

The only conceptual things that I remember really thinking about in high school were my drawings of goats. I latched on to that image because I attached symbolism to them. In college, I became more figural. I was interested in the idea of women in art history and the nude. I was thinking about very physical bodies and made a painting and some prints incorporating that. And then I got really bored and I almost did a 180. I have done almost exclusively buildings now and I hope that I keep going. I hope that I don't lose interest in this because I have way more to say.

You incorporate many images of houses and articles of domesticity in your work. How is your relationship to your home and the concept of home expressed in your current portfolio?

We moved from one neighborhood to another neighborhood in Queens when I was around eight years old. So we've only been in my house for about ten years, and my parents came to the United States from the Soviet Union in the 90s, so there's no intergenerational home space for me in the way that a lot of my friends have. My parents are also planning to leave New York next year when my sister goes to college. I've been thinking about that anxiety as well, trying to rationalize this space that has been my home for a decade and is now going to be obsolete to me. But it's also a space that never really meant that much to me because it's not a generational space.

That idea has informed my work recently. In a recent project of mine, I used a wood panel to paint a brownstone apartment on the front and an interior space on the underside with furniture and people. I've been thinking about detaching myself from the home, and thinking about it as a separate structure that I use, and not so much an interior that I occupy. I'm interested in what that connection between the home and the house means, and how we construct what the spaces we're in mean to us.

In what ways do you portray trauma in your art?

Because there's so much architectural space in New York City we occupy a series of interiors throughout our lives here. We're either in the home, our workplace, or school. I feel like I'm always inside and the inside hides a lot of things. The house represents both a facade and an architectural space. I had a lot of bad experiences over winter break that particularly colored that for me. I felt very suffocated at that time. Since I felt like I was always in this interior where bad things would happen to me, there was almost no escape from the interior. Those spaces then became colored with that trauma.

A project that I'm working on now is very influenced by that. My dad was a dentist and had an office that I recently passed by. I thought it had been bought out and closed for a long time because he died when I was in middle school, but I saw that the mailbox still said dentist office and I looked inside and it was exactly as I remembered it from over ten years ago. It freaked me out because I looked in there and it was empty and dusty but all of the rooms were in the same configuration. So I took a picture of the windows of the dentist office and I'm going to screen print those onto a house I'm creating. Trauma in an interior is very subtle in my work because I view it as hidden.
A lot of your pieces involve architectural sketches and prints. How do these exterior presentations of structures juxtapose this concept of the power of the interior?

I've been thinking about exteriors as the overall city projects, and the interior as more specific to myself. But that's definitely a next step for me, conjoining. I'm thinking about these very hyper specific, individual pieces like the dentist office and different parts of Queens that I've grown up in, and then incorporating the interior. I'm planning to include architectural drawings juxtaposed with rooms and other interior spaces.

I feel like the city itself is an interior. I feel like I'm in a bubble here, and maybe that's because New York City is such a liberal and unique place in the United States. I've been reading about the anti-trans bills that have been passed within the last few weeks. There's always been this sense of relief from the idea that it's not going to affect me or anyone I know; that separation is very dangerous. It also characterizes the city as an interior that's not affected by a lot of the things that are happening in the rest of the country. It's very troubling.

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

I want to go bigger. It's really easy to make small work. I can make more a lot faster and it's more gratifying for me than having one thing over the course of two months. But I would really like to have the facilities to work on a bigger scale. I like the idea of expanding what I already have. And I’m trying to make my practice more specific and research oriented.

There's an impression that artists are active gentrifiers of neighborhoods, because of their presence. Artists will go to a neighborhood and the money will follow and then artists will leave and the money will keep following them.

There's often a tense relationship between the arts and local communities in parts of New York City. I want to address that in my work more actively, and think about it not as someone that's encroaching on a place, but part of it. That's the key, becoming an artist that is actively participating in the community and allowing their work to represent that community accurately and interestingly.

Where can we find more of your work?

My Instagram @vilinda.a and my website!

Danielle Sung

April 29, 2023

Feature by Sayuri Govender

Photos by Will Park

Danielle Sung is a freshman at Columbia College. In her work, she illuminates the voices of marginalized groups who have been impacted by current day events. She hopes that the radical figures and techniques she uses in her work can be catalysts for social change. Sung is currently focused on installation work, and has created numerous astounding pieces with charged political meaning. Today, I talked with her about her exploration of new mediums, balancing the personal and the political, and finding the best burrata in NYC.
What is your creative process like?

It's kind of complicated for me, because I feel like I have grown and changed so much as an artist over the years. I started off with still life painting, which is pretty natural, just painting what I see. And then I shifted to portraits, which are also pretty simple, because I didn't have any real artistic inspiration. Then, I was introduced to other mediums besides oil paint in my junior year of high school. The discovery of these materials allowed me to start exploring beyond still-life or portraits. I was able to discern what I think is valuable and what I think should be portrayed in a painting.

When I started making my college portfolio in my senior year of high school, my teacher showed me this quote by James Baldwin, which has stuck with me deeply. Baldwin says the precise role of an artist is to “illuminate darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lost sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place”. After hearing that, I suddenly felt that my art could be a catalyst for change.

On a similar note, what inspires you as an artist?

I can't speak for myself now because I'm going through an artistic slump. I haven't created art in over a year, which I feel really guilty about. But during the pandemic, I created art nonstop. I was locked in my room and I was depressed; I felt trapped physically and mentally, because I was away from all my friends from my high school in New Hampshire and was back home in Korea for the first time in two years. I needed an outlet to take out my stress and express my feelings of sadness and isolation. I started following the news about Covid, and saw all these horrific deaths happening. That became a catalyst for my art: it prompted me to give those people I heard about in the news a voice, because we were all trapped. So I thought my art would be a radical way for me to express my thoughts and also give other people the voice they deserved.

How did switching from a personal to a global and political lens in your art impact you as an artist?

I still have a lot of trouble when finding the boundary between the personal and the public aspects of art. Art itself is very performative, since it's meant to be consumed by an audience, but I also want to create art for myself without focusing on who the audience will be. I feel like that's what I really leaned towards throughout my entire life. All throughout my life, until high school, I created a lot of art about me, my identity, my interests, all while exploring the medium that I liked the most.

However, ever since the pandemic, I realized I needed to be more aware of my surroundings and less concerned with solely my life. I started realizing how little knowledge I had about political and societal aspects of our world. I became really focused on those aspects of our world through talking about it with other people, asking people questions about their own thoughts and what, objectively, was going on, and reading the headlines on my phone. These headlines would always be about deaths, Black Lives Matter, and other global riots going on. I felt that these shouldn't be suppressed to just one headline, and that they could be much bigger. That's why I chose to create these types of activist artworks in a grandiose way. I had never done installations before, but I felt that a single canvas wouldn't suffice for all of it. I was able to develop my own thoughts and then express those in my own paintings. But it was a very gradual process. And I feel like I'm still working on that.

During that time, you shifted from canvas work to installations and ink. What was the process like transitioning into those mediums?

Until my second year of high school, I was really fixated on oil paintings, especially because I did a lot of that art in Korea. In Korea, they teach excellent technique, but it's very restrictive and there’s not a lot of space for medium exploration. You must look at something and paint it exactly the way it is. So I really thought that all my life oil painting would be it, or at least just drawing what I see. However, in high school, I had these two really wonderful art teachers who introduced me to other aspects of art and different mediums. At that point I fell in love with mediums such as fabric and ink, and started incorporating them into my art. It was small scale experimentation at first, but then I tried something big for the first time by buying an entire roll of fabric and painting on it. I thought it would be scary, but it was very liberating. Then I realized that a canvas boundary wasn't it for me, and that there's so much more out there I wanted to explore limitlessly. Now, I don't think I can ever go back to a single canvas!

That's incredible! You talked about growing up in Korea and then coming to the U.S. for high school. What role do those identities play in the art you create?

I've always been really confused about my cultural identity because I was born in New York and I lived here for the first few years of my life. Because of that my family still knows a lot of people in the city. So I've always thought of New York as my home. When I went back to Korea, I attended an international school for middle school, which had a lot of English and a lot of American culture while also being in a separate geographical area. However, when I came back to high school here, I had to deal with identity crises and cultural confusion. My school in New Hampshire was incredibly diverse, thankfully, but it was just an adjustment for me, to actually live here by myself, with the rest of my family being back home in Korea. I dealt with these feelings in my earlier paintings, where I drew myself plastering Korean fabric around in the background. Through that type of art, I began to gain more clarity about my identity. Thus I stopped exploring it as my art progressed. It's now more about the world, other people, and their identities. So it's a shift from the personal to the public.

Do you ever see yourself reflected in your exploration of others?

In most of my most recent artworks, I tried to take an objective lens on the world. I tell people that I try to paint my pieces concerning societal topics and worldly events in an objective lens, but honestly, that’s something that I’ve been working on finding the balance for. For a while, I just felt so overwhelmed with emotions when I was making art to the point where I just couldn’t really create anything I felt satisfied with. So I just put down my ink brush and I just gave myself a few weeks to take deep breaths and reflect on my main reason for creating art. I ultimately tried approaching my art in an “objective” lens, in hope that I could possibly refrain from being the main character of these larger societal problems that I am not the biggest victim of. Like for my COVID installation piece, I was aiming to capture the loss of millions due to the pandemic. Although I am second handedly affected due to the larger scope of the effects COVID-19 has had on us, I am not the one that should be the central character: the victims are those who have passed away whilst fighting for their lives. Likewise, when depicting those riots dealing with Black and/or queer lives, as an individual who does not identify as those racial or sexual identities, the most I can do is express my deepest and genuine sympathy. I cannot try portraying these events in my artworks by putting myself in their shoes cause I’m just not them. That’s what I mean by trying to refrain from self-opinion or the subjective in my pieces. My sympathy still exists and hopefully it is expressed through my artworks. After all, that’s the essence of my pieces: I just want to follow Baldwin’s words and “illuminate” the “darkness” and make the world “a more human dwelling place.” I just feel like there is a difference between creating a piece that is poignant and sympathetic versus creating art by trying to relate to the individuals and those immediately affected by these incidents.

A lot of your art is centered around uncomfortable conversations. How do you find comfort in the uncomfortable?

Finding comfort in the uncomfortable is done by talking about those uncomfortable things. That can be talking it out by yourself, with others, or through art. I was very, very shy–until middle school at least–so I tried to suppress all my thoughts and my feelings to myself and I ultimately felt really trapped in that. I saw that I wasn't really making any progress in my thoughts. However, talking about the stuff I wanted to talk about with people that would listen and not judge is how I expanded my horizons and expanded my thoughts. Everyone has different thoughts about different things. The fact that you can talk about it with them and understand your differences is what makes you closer and what makes you more grounded in the world. In terms of art, expressing my own thoughts, or the lack thereof–because as I said, mine was pretty objective–is a perfect way to really find comfort in the uncomfortable.

What message do you wish to convey with your art?

I just hope that someone–at least one person–finds a voice for themselves by resonating with whatever I create. I want them to see my art and then find comfort in the ability to express their own opinions or ideas in the way I did, and through whatever medium they want. Whether it's just going up and talking to another person about what they saw, writing it out, or creating art like I did, I hope they can expand their own thoughts from seeing mine.

Are there any artistic practices that you want to explore in the future?

I want art to be a part of my life forever. This past winter break, when I was having doubts about my artistic career, my mom motivated me to create artwork for our home. She wanted me to create this really huge art piece for the living room. So, I took two straight days and created this very abstract white plaster piece that I never thought I would be creating, and that kind of flicked a light bulb in my head. I've never created abstract artwork before, but I really enjoyed it and can see myself exploring it.

I can still imagine myself going back to being an artist when I'm 60 or something and just creating art while sitting on the patio. I'm just hoping that the works I've created will be the starting pieces of my future artistic career. I definitely have more that I want to create, it's just a matter of me getting myself into a studio and grinding it all out, while also going through the college experience.

What do you think is your favorite piece you've created and why?

I'd say this piece called Mr. President. It's very heavy and not as big as people would think. I just cut up a bunch of magazines and glued them together, having fun with the different patterns and the colors that are displayed in the edges. It made my hands so messy, and they were very burnt by the end of the two weeks that I worked on it. My hands were the grossest ever! But, I feel like because of that, I was so proud of my result. It's stuff like that I never thought I would be creating because of how restricted I was with myself and the medium. So trying stuff like that was just really, really entertaining to me. And I feel like that piece especially was just a very nice intersection of my interest in politics, media--as in videos and magazines-- and mixed media materials. It was a very fun piece to mess with!

You’re not just an artist, but also a major food connoisseur. I saw that you've been looking for the best burrata in New York City since you’ve moved here. Have you found it? Tell me more!

Oh, my goodness, I am so excited you asked this! I created a burrata account on Instagram a few weeks ago (@theburratatologist). I've started rating every burrata I've eaten in the past, and I'm actually going to eat three burratas this weekend. I'm definitely still on the search. I have four posts so far and it's still an ongoing process. I feel like New York's the perfect city for this. So I'm very, very invested. Maybe I should take that effort and put it in my art, haha! I'm very dedicated to it.

How can Ratrock readers learn more about you and your art?

They can reach me through my website daniellejsung.com and/or Instagram (@daniellesung)!

Kathryn Whitten

April 28, 2023

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Anais Mitelberg

Kathryn Whitten is a Junior at Columbia College majoring in Visual Arts. She creates calm, colorful, realistic pieces using different mediums, although she prefers oil painting. She has grown up surrounded by art, and likes to express love, devotion and appreciation for her subjects and a moment’s details in her work. Today we met via Zoom, so our conversation progressed dynamically, as we moved around trying to find the best connection possible.. We spoke about the process of growing up, the clash between realism and abstraction, and what it means to be away from home.

Tell me a little about your relationship with art.

My dad is a painter, so I grew up with art all around me. I’ve never not been surrounded by it. However, a deciding moment in consolidating myself as an artist was in third grade. I had a drawing assignment and I really wanted to draw Harry Potter to the T. I remember my dad sat down with me and taught me how to draw, how to really look at things in order to represent proportions accurately. After that, I was hooked. I started out by drawing celebrities or cartoons, but eventually I progressed into landscape, my family, my friends, and my boyfriend.

Why do you make art?

It’s a personal thing for myself, something for me to show love and devotion. I do art because it slowly allows me to capture everything, to represent reality as I process it. Then, when I show the work, I want it to have an effect on other people, to share everyday scenes as beautiful, as appreciated and loved. My TA said to me in class the other day, “You see beauty in everyday life?” and when I nodded she said “Oh, that must be nice”. I want to encourage others to look for that beauty in their own lives. I think part of what I want to share is the way that I get to see the world as an artist, because I feel so blessed for being able to find deep beauty in the mundane - I want others to experience that too.

How did you venture into different kinds of mediums?

KW: I was really interested in oil because of my father. He gave me my first set of oils when I was 11 and promptly took them away after a month because I kept on getting it all on the walls. After this, I figured I'd try acrylics out. I stuck to this technique for a while since I had more exposure to acrylics than oils. Since I live close to the National Seashore, I’ve always been inspired by the landscape. We would go and visit mostly Yosemite and the National Seashore, so I relate these landscapes to such dear moments in my life. When, eventually, I got my oils back, I specialized in landscape art. I love to use oils for this because it is limitless when it comes to colors and textures, it paints so beautifully.

You have some pieces in crayons, could you tell me why you ventured into that specific medium?

I really don't know why, I just love crayons. My mom was a kindergarten teacher, and one day, I was hanging out in her classroom and didn’t have my materials around, so I decided to take some crayons out of her drawers to work with. I truly loved them. The texture they make is just really nice, they layer and mix colors weirdly beautifully. For one of my classes I had to draw a full scale portrait, so I did it with crayons because they’re also super cheap. It was nice to be able to go and buy a $5 box of crayons and make a cool piece.

I did want to mention, I've gotten super into printmaking lately, which is something that I did not have any access to before coming to Columbia. I found a class that offers it, which we're really lucky to have because it's hard to find good printmaking classes outside of school. I took an intaglio class and I fell in love with that process because I love that I can get these shades of different values, which is already how I paint.

How has your inspiration changed as you’ve grown up?

As a kid I’d draw what I was interested in: celebrities, crushes, cartoons… whatever I liked. My mom would always look over my shoulder and tease me because I was drawing my new crush. Nevertheless, my interests changed as I got older. I soon shifted to focusing on landscape, family, and my boyfriend. But I guess I still paint what I like. Coming to New York solidified my interest in two main topics: California and my boyfriend. Probably because I’m away from them and miss them so much. I paint about them to feel them closer to me. But lately, I’ve grown interested in painting people around me too. I love that art can be a way to build community–to bring people closer together. With portrait painting specifically, I have been trying to figure out how to implement more portraits in New York, but there’s a lot of practical challenges having to do with that.

What are some of those practical challenges?

KW: I only draw when I’m truly, deeply, inspired - not only by the subject, but by the lighting and the overall composition in a precise moment. Here, since my community isn’t as strong, and life goes a lot faster than when I’m at home, I have to start worrying about staging perfect moments to paint, getting someone to model, setting up the lighting... And I hate feeling that the moment I am trying to paint is staged or inauthentic, but it is unavoidable, because when I find moments I want to capture, announcing that I’m about to take a picture damages the ephemerality of the moment.

Then, do you exclusively work from reference?

I do. In order to overcome these limitations, I have been learning to paint from memory. But that's still in the works. One of my favorite painters, Pierre Bonnard, decided he needed to learn to work from memory. So, he spent two years doing nothing but drawing, and trying to figure out a way to remember things well enough to paint it. His work inspires me so much that I need to learn his technique!

Have you ever tried to make abstract pieces?

I paint realistic pieces because it’s my way of capturing my subject with devotion, care, and gratitude. I respect what I am painting. To me, making art isn’t just about me, it's an attempt to capture my feelings towards someone I love in a particular instant.

However, I don’t like painting overly realistically to the point where my art becomes an illusion, because I think that makes for a faster read of a painting. I play with pieces, and shades of color that can be seen abstractly. It forces the viewer to slow down when interpreting the painting; they have to identify the shade of color and the shapes of its placement, place it somewhere on the canvas, while also seeing it in the context of the overall images. I enjoy that temporal aspect to the act of consuming art–it makes you have to look for longer and process it slowly, enjoying every millimeter of each piece.

What are your favorite pieces in your catalog?

My favorite piece at the moment is a painting of my boyfriend that I titled Blonde on Blue. I was super proud of myself for that title because I'm a huge Bob Dylan fan, and he's got that album Blonde on Blonde, so I was like, ‘this is genius.’ Aside from that, I love that painting because it’s a tender memory of just being with my boyfriend. He always sleeps in, and I love waking up early in the morning. This particular morning I was drinking coffee and reading, and the light was coming in so perfectly–the way it reflected on his blue sheets and his skin was beautiful. People always ask me why I have so much blue in my paintings, they think it's a profound thing, but actually it’s just that my boyfriend’s sheets are blue.

On the other hand, some of the recent paintings I've been making in my painting class have been difficult for me because I must work exclusively from photos. It’s becoming repetitive, and I don't like when things get too easy, or mechanical. There’s no struggle. The creative process of making mistakes and changing your mind diminishes, which I really dislike. I have lost part of my engagement with the paintings lately, just because of that technical limitation. You can tell when a piece has been automated: you can see if the artist is not engaged or actively making decisions or figuring things out. When it comes too easy, the painting doesn’t turn out as well.

How can you tell whether an artist is engaging with his subject matter or not?

First of all, you can always tell if an artist has certain things that they've done a million times. Then it becomes shorthand for them–you can tell that they've just done it quickly.

Recently I went with my dad to see a John Singer Sargent show in San Francisco, and he would repeat this mannerism again and again. We both thought he was too good at this specific stroke for his own good. It seemed like he was whipping it out because it was easy- it seemed impersonal and automatic.

On the other hand, paintings where you can see the artist making decisions as they go through it, changing their mind… I love those! Matisse drawings where you can see his erased versions, behind the final one. I love that! There’s also one from Bonnard- he had a piece hanging up in a museum and he proceeded to have someone distract the museum’s guard so that he could use a box of travel paints to alter the piece, right then and there. I like the idea of art never being finished.

You have quite a few self portraits. What does painting yourself mean to you?

I started doing self portraits as a way to overcome the technical challenges I mentioned earlier.I wanted to make instantaneous paintings, and the only model I could do that with was me. Drawing myself, I gained that immediacy that I was looking for. Also, because my relationship with my body has changed throughout the years, I love that when I'm making a self portrait, I force myself to view something abstractly, so I can then represent it accurately. When I get into that zone, I’m freed from all those judgments. That’s cool to think about because that's what happens when you start appreciating all this beauty around you. When you see things and translate into an abstract thought, you don’t make a judgment, your job then is to translate it, yet again, into art - isn’t that great?

One cool example is Catherine Murphy, who does hyperrealism, and she talks about how the artist has to be able to completely go into abstract mode to be able to paint something realistically. She told a story about painting this box that had 11 pounds written on it and her husband came in and was like, ‘oh, 11 pounds,’ and she was like, ‘what?’ She hadn't even realized that she had written 11 pounds on the painting. I think that that's a great story to illustrate what it feels like to be painting realism, and the process of translating reality into art. Going through this process with myself is really interesting because I become abstract while I paint myself, which has helped me to see myself with less judgment, and more appreciation.

Luca Benzimra

April 26, 2023

Feature by Brontë Grimmer

Photos by Jade Li and Caroline Cavalier

Luca Benzimra is a junior studying Philosophy and Business at Columbia, where he is currently completing a dual degree with Sciences Po. Born and raised in Paris, Benzimra experiments with bleach and dye to create large swaths of color that bleed into the canvases. Marking a departure from his previous figurative pieces with acrylic and oils, his new series explores themes of philosophy, emotion, and the true-self.

Benzimra's approach can be viewed as an artistic continuation of work done during the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s that he uses to enter into philosophical discussions on subjects such as self-knowledge. Entirely self taught, Benzimra’s process is both additive and subtractive, as his use of dyes and bleach allows him to layer and remove color to create lush canvases. The use of his subconscious mind is critical to his work - as the free, unreserved expression of his subconscious desires and beliefs is at the core of his artistic voice. During our conversation, we discussed his artistic practices, the underlying principles of his art, his aspirations for the future, and how he sees the act of creation as a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human.

Luca Benzimra, *They are living in peace,* fabric dye and bleach on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

Your most recent dye series has a very distinct style characterized by large blocks of color fading into one another. What did your early experiences with the arts look like?

Before this series, I experimented with various mediums; oil pastels, oil paints, acrylics, spray paints, and so on. My work was a mix of figurative stuff, but I found I was never satisfied with purely figurative depictions, I was always sort of distorting them. After I got bored with oil paints, I added in acrylics and spray paint. While they were much less figurative, they were still very precise.

What do you believe caused this shift from figurative art to a more abstract style?

With figurative pieces, I always thought there were imperfections in my work. With dyes in my new series, there are no imperfections. I think that's one of the reasons why I like this medium. I get to finish a painting when I think it's right, and it doesn't need to be precise or look a certain way. That’s not to say I never feel frustrated with dyes. Sometimes I’ll think a work is finished because it looks balanced, until I look back on it. But there's something that excites me about this dilemma.

I had a piece in the beginning which I didn’t like and never wanted to post online, but I continued working on it. I added more and more layers on top of the original piece, and now I’m satisfied with it.

Luca Benzimra, *On the edge,* fabric dye and bleach on canvas, 48 x 72 inches.

Were there reasons other than the desire to experiment and represent forms differently that drove you to start using dye?

After moving to New York in the autumn of 2022, I was looking for cheaper alternatives in terms of medium, so it was mainly because of financial reasons. In Paris, I could buy materials for way less and had a studio where I could work and stretch my canvases, but I don’t have that here.

I went to the Blick store one day and bought some dyes and a pack of small canvases. I didn’t know how to use them, but I experimented anyway. The first time I tried using dyes, it was so awful, all except for one. It was a process of trial and error.

Luca Benzimra, *unbothered,* fabric dye and bleach on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

As a student, do you feel that there is a connection between your studies and your art?

I’d say I’ve become more invested in my art since I started studying philosophy.

My favorite area right now is self-knowledge; the pursuit of understanding what the true self means. I believe we’re never really going to have an answer to what the true self is by trying to explain our ideas through writing.

The only way I can express myself in the truest possible way, which has no constraints imposed by language or representation, is through my art. In a way, the unconstrained self is what I'm trying to access. To me, it's being able to completely pour my subconscious out on a canvas. Once I’m done working, there's a point where I think to myself, “Okay, now this is finished,” and everything I did was completely unconscious.

Luca Benzimra, *Dilemma,* fabric dye and bleach on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

Do you have any hopes for how other people perceive your art?

I think the cool thing about art is everybody has a different experience with it. If an artist has a clear thing to say about their piece, I think it's always nice to have the context of what they were thinking. However, by no means is my art supposed to have a strict meaning. My series right now is extremely selfish, it's a portrait of me.

As long as the person feels something, I think it's cool. Paintings resonate with you because of who you are, your experiences, what you’ve been through, or your trauma. Our understanding of the arts and representation is an active thing within us that is always reacting to our environments.

Luca Benzimra, *Des poèmes marqués par le temps,* acrylic, 48 x 60 inches.

How do you hope to foster your love for the arts in the future? Do you see your artistic practice as a career or as more of a hobby?

The reason why I decided not to go to art school is that art is not the only thing I'm interested in. Art for me is necessary, it's an extension of who I am. I think it is very important to nurture this aspect of myself.

I'm always going to make room for art. I want to be a full-time artist, it's a dream, but I also don't think I would be satisfied with having art as my only pursuit. Only pursuing art also means forgetting another part of myself, which I want to continue to possess.

Such a drastic change between styles clearly indicates that you’re open to artistic exploration. How do you approach pursuing a life as an artist?

Some people fully embrace their creative side and make art their means of expression, putting their creativity into visual practice. We tend to consider these people as artists more than other people just because their art is visual, but not all art is meant to be seen. Showcasing your art does not make you more of an artist than somebody else.

I don’t like the label of being an ‘artist.’ I think everyone is one. For me, I'm into painting because I love that aspect of the human experience. Being able to be creative is what makes me human.

Luca Benzimra, *Frustrated,* fabric dye and bleach on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

Is there anything else you want to share?

I don’t want people to feel they are not talented in the arts. Don't let intrinsic artistic ability be a barrier, I actually don’t really think that exists. Having an artistic practice that you sustain makes people fuller individuals. If you enjoy writing, write. If you enjoy singing, sing. Pursuing the arts is having a conversation with yourself, which is important because we are rarely in conversation with our true selves.

How can we keep up with what you’re up to?

My Instagram, my handle is @lucabenzimra.

My website: https://www.lucabenzimra.com/

Luca Benzimra, *last minute,* fabric dye and bleach on canvas, 39 x 48 inches

Grace Li

April 20, 2023

Feature by Yam Pothikamjorn

Photos by Will Park

Grace is a junior at Barnard College, studying English Literature and Computer Science. She’s dabbled in multiple art forms, including ceramics and textiles, but her principal focus is her photography. We discussed her current projects, why they are so important to her, and what it means to forget.

Grace’s biggest project right now is her AAPI Tattoo Artists in NYC Photo Series, which she started 6 months ago. She interviews Asian tattoo artists in New York City and photographs them at work, intending to highlight different generations of tattoo artists and how their processes vary between cultures. “In post-pandemic New York City, there are a lot of Chinese American artists who have turned to tattooing as a way to reclaim their bodies from the conservative households they grew up in, to say ‘This is my body and I can decorate it however I want.’” she informs me.

Grace interviewed a young artist who emphasizes creating a space for Filipino people where they can heal and allow themselves to be fully present in their body during the tattooing experience. “She was saying that tattooing can bring up a lot of unprocessed emotions, especially when they're tattooing something that's deeply personal.” In her private studio, this artist uses tools such as aromatherapy, soft lighting, and awareness of the client’s background. She incorporates her knowledge of the human body and its energy which she learned from working towards her yoga instructor license, and offers a space for them to talk about the memories the tattoo brings up - whatever the client wants.

For many, facing and accepting the unprocessed emotions brought up by tattooing helps them to embrace the things they’ve gone through. Grace’s childhood home series is her own form of tattooing, a way to process her past. She started the project to learn how to put feelings into photographs, trying to capture how she felt growing up in suburban New Hampshire. “There were a lot of complex feelings surrounding that, especially being one of the only Chinese families in the neighborhood at the time. There’s also the feeling of isolation, even when you’re not experiencing loneliness all the time. I went to boarding school for high school, so that feeling of leaving home quite early and returning back there, especially since the pandemic, was a really interesting feeling that I wanted to document and capture.”

But what does forgetting mean to Grace? It’s one of the questions I’m most curious to hear her answer. “I really like to have control – forgetting has been a very scary process because I really want to hold onto things. However, I’ve realized growing up and especially over the pandemic, that it’s important to accept that forgetting is just a natural part of life and to learn to appreciate the beauty of forgetting, perhaps.”

You can find Grace’s work at:

@gracestills on Instagram

https://www.gracestills.com

Sophie Johnson

April 12, 2023

Feature by Julia Tolda

Photos by Frances Cohen

It’s almost dusk when visual artist Sophie Johnson and I meet at Café Amrita. Inside, the speakers blast Spanish covers of 80s pop-hits, V for Vendetta plays on mute on the television, and customers waltz in and out through the French doors. But it is in this chaotic atmosphere that self-described goth-adjacent Sophie shines brightest. In our conversation, she discusses her inspirations, shares pieces directly from her art journal, and reclaims the term “weird”.

JULIA TOLDA: My first question is the most basic one: can you tell me about yourself?

SOPHIE JOHNSON: Oh man. Uh… I don't know what to say.

JT: I can give you more pointed questions if you’d like.

SJ: Sure, if you wouldn't mind.

JT: What school do you go to? When are you graduating? What's your major?

SJ: Barnard College. Class of 2025. Film studies major.

JT: Is there any particular concentration in film that interests you?

SJ: My dream is to become a screenwriter and a director. However, it's such a tough industry to break into that I have no idea. I just like telling stories, it's my favorite part of the whole thing.

JT: Where are you from?

SJ: Switzerland, the French-speaking part, near Geneva. Born and raised.

JT: How do you think growing up there has impacted your art?

SJ: The Swiss high school academic curriculum is very different from the American one. As part of it, we had to choose our own major, quote unquote. There's a lot of options, like math and physics, econ, biochem, Spanish or Italian... And of course there's art, which is what I took. The program was two-thirds studio art, and one third art history.

And as much as I hated the studio art class (so much!), it has impacted me a lot in terms of the mediums that I use. There was a lot of emphasis put on multimedia art, which forced me to get out of my comfort zone constantly. At first, I was kind of a purist (and still am)... But now I either go full in and mix everything, or I stick to one very specific medium.

JT: What kind of mediums are you interested in? What kinds of mediums would you like to explore?

SJ: I mostly work with color pencils. But recently, I've been playing around with digital art, touching up a lot of the things that I do digitally. I'm trying to play around with the effects that that can give. I also make collages using random trinkets that I find. I recently did one with leaves. But I also use any scrap pieces of paper that I find… This is probably not the best thing to say, but I do draw all the time, including during lectures…

I would be thrilled to work with textiles, maybe incorporating it in collages. I'd also love to work with ceramics and to make sculptures, because I want to touch my own art all the time. While touching it is currently a bad idea, because I work with colored pencils, which can smudge, I feel like sculptures would be perfect for that! I additionally want to get more comfortable with digital art, because I think it allows for so many possibilities. But one thing I don't like about digital art is how polished it looks; it lacks the sketchiness, the messiness, the weird finger-shaped stains that I enjoy.

JT: In a couple sentences, how would you describe your art style?

SJ: Repetitive. A lot of repetitive motifs. A lot of the same color schemes. Focused on specific parts of the body. Not as a whole but, fragmented. I'm interested in perspective–how you look at the world, or how you look at art or how art looks at you.

JT: What motifs are ubiquitous in your work?

SJ: Eyes, for sure, all the time. I never grew out of doodling eyes in the corners of my notebooks. They always look slightly fucked up, crossed, or slightly off—weird.

JT: What are some of the perspectives that you embrace while making art?

SJ: I remember I was talking about my art with someone and she said “Oh, it makes me feel very protected”. And that's interesting because, to me, my art actually translates a sense of anxiety.

I don't like directing people's interpretations of my art. I do have an intention behind it, but so long as the bare bones are understood, I feel totally fine with people projecting meaning onto it—whether or not I intended it.

Another aspect that is important to me is storytelling. Some pieces are more influenced by a specific perspective. Then, I will be inspired to draw based on a specific scenario, or interior perspective, or character.

JT: Many of your art pieces contain writing. Can you tell me more about it?

SJ: A lot of the writing that I include on my pieces isn't what I would consider my “good writing.” It is not the kind of writing I would feel comfortable submitting on its own.

They're not diary entries, but they have more of that feel to them. I can be more honest in them. Are they telling the full story? No. But they convey a certain sense, a certain specific perspective.

I label everything all the time. I love having silly little labels on everything. A lot of my writing can be just very long labels–an over explanation. You can interpret it however you want, but I'm still going to try and direct your focus towards what I want.

JT: What are some of the labels that you put on your art? Literally and metaphorically?

SJ: Literally, I've been getting into trying to draw specific things, like spiders for example. In those instances, I add labels just for my clarity's sake!

Metaphorically, I’d label my art as neither experimental nor fully polished. It's somewhere in between, which I can show to other people and be proud of it.

JT: Walk me through your creative process. How do you start a piece? When do you know it's done?

SJ: The latter is a much easier question because the answer is usually never! I never know when a piece is finished. I add as many details as I possibly can, only to look at it and think “It’s too crowded, I should’ve stopped while I was ahead!” My art is never really finished, I’m eternally trying to make it look different, or better, or just more crowded.

My creative process varies on a piece by piece basis. Sometimes I start with an idea, which I will sketch out. And sometimes that little sketch, which I thought was an idea for another piece, becomes the final piece.

JT: Where do you draw your inspiration from?

SJ: Louise Bourgeois, especially her spiders, her shapes, inspire me. I first saw her art when I was a sophomore in high school, and I remember thinking “this is gonna change my life, I just don't know how yet.”

Recently, I've been looking at textile art, because of the interesting way it allows for representing the body. For example, I saw a knit version of human internal organs which really inspired me.

And body horror. Most of my writing is body horror inspired, which I also attempt to capture in my drawings. To me, my art looks like something I could eat. Objectively, it looks weird and kind of gross. But the colors are so appealing that it doesn’t feel disturbing.

JT: What about body horror draws you in?

SJ: It allows for an exploration of the physical self in a way that is cathartic. You can project any meaning onto these brutal transformations. It’s an externalization of internal feelings and experiences. I find strange beauty in what has been dubbed “weird.”

I think its essence is the transformation of a body, an altering from its previous state, through a very intense, very visual process.

I like to think that every time I go out, I get dressed, I present myself to the world, or I create art, I'm transforming into a version of myself that I appreciate more. A version of me that feels more representative of what I want to show the world.

JT: How do you feel about the word “weird”?

SJ: This sounds really corny, but I want to think that I've reclaimed what “weird” means. I've always tried to project this image of myself as someone who does not care about the opinions of others. That’s not as true as I like it to be, but through my art, I'm trying to embrace my weirdness in a new way.

JT: Do you see art as a challenge?

SJ: It depends. Sometimes it's challenging and annoying and it looks like shit. And then sometimes it's challenging, annoying, it looks like shit, but I can say “wow, I did this and it's incredible!” It can either feel like a welcome challenge, or familiar, well-known territory. You can't spend your entire time hating art and especially not the art that you make. I’ve gone through those phases. It's not productive. And not in the capitalist sense of “producing more,” but in the sense it is just not gonna get you anywhere artistically.

Forest Wong

April 11, 2023

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Emily Lord

Forest Wong is a Junior at Columbia College studying Visual Arts, who works mostly with charcoal, graphite, oils, and chalk pastels. She has been creating art since she was a child. Forest is her given name, chosen before her mother knew the baby’s gender. Forest thinks that is pretty cool. In her interview, she discussed her approach to art, her malleability as an artist, her family, and AI generated art. At the end of the interview, we realized we had forgotten to order coffee.

C: First, tell me a bit about yourself as an artist.

FW: Growing up, I've mostly drawn with charcoal, graphite, and chalk pastel. I stuck to those chalky substances because I really liked how they moved, and how I could really mess with and play around with them. Now, I've been working with oil, since I also like how it moves on the canvas. I am interested in manipulating, exploring it. Also, I have always admired people who used oil. Growing up, I would watch my grandpa and my mom paint, which encouraged me to make art. Transitioning into oil has been an extension of that.

SC: How has your relationship to your family affected you as an artist?

FW: I come from a very artistic household, so it always felt natural to start doing art. I saw so many artistic creations I wanted to emulate, made by people I look up to, so I began exploring, and now here I am. The same happened with music. My mom and brother play the piano; I would see them and think, "I'll click around on the keys, too."

SC: Could you tell me more about the piece with your family portraits?

FW: While making that, I wanted to have fun playing with different materials. The materials I had were the same things that would be lying around my home. A Yakult bottle, grass jelly, stuff like that. Since I was feeling really homesick last spring, I wanted to incorporate my family in my work by tying in their portraits, and implementing other themes with things you might find around a Chinese house specifically.

SC: Was this piece specific to certain family customs?

FW: Yeah, those types of rituals I never really thought about growing up, but now that I'm not physically there with them, I see their value differently. I thought about it and it's another way to get closer with my family, having that memory of them.

SC: Could you tell me about your affinity to making textured, unblended, and visible strokes?

FW: The act of painting and drawing is so magical, right? Because when you look at a finished painting, you're just wowed by it, like, “Huh, wow, someone was able to produce this.” There's something about showing the process in the physical marks themselves that is interesting to me. A painting is just a collection of marks on a surface. That's what I'm interested in. Chalk and oil give me that plasticity and malleability, they're so versatile. The marks depend on the thickness of the stroke, the speed of it—each mark conveys a lot, they capture the gesture of the hand, too. You get to see the process of it.

SC: Is making visible strokes a technical or emotional choice for you?

FW: Both, I think. I like to be very careful not to let the strokes get lost in what I'm doing, because my goal is to show the audience the process I went through. I like guiding their eyes and having the painting be a visible creation, not just an end goal.

I hate feeling like I overworked a painting, and I've done it so many times. If you overwork the painting it's the most tragic thing, because the process of making it is so beautiful and so fun. Sometimes after a few hours or days I look back at it and think, “Oh god, I killed it.” Showing the raw process is the most satisfying relationship with your past because you get to see what you did and how it was done.

SC: How have you changed your approach to art?

FW: When you're first learning and trying to pick up as much as you can, you just draw what you see. Initially, I would only work with references. And I still do, in some ways, but now I'm paying attention to the design, the message, to the parts that are important to me. If I'm looking at my portraits as just portraits, they don't have another meaning to them. But in the portraits I make now, I'm paying a lot more attention to where I want to lead people's eyes based on contrast, value, and color. Before, I was purely into representation. I just wanted to get it to look like the thing I was looking at— transferring this to this, like in photo realism, or just photography. I just wanted it to look accurate, but now I'm trying to be more loose with it, trying to direct it. I don't just copy, I get inspired by what I see.

SC: And how would you define your relationship with your past work?

FW: I definitely like some of it, but other pieces make me cringe. Especially the work that I did two years ago. I don't want to look at it because I've changed so much since being at Columbia, learning, and growing up. I just don't want to touch it, you know?

SC: I know you mentioned you like high contrast painting, like the Tumbling series and the stuffed animal piece, could you tell me more about that? Are you incorporating that technique in more of your work?

FW: Actually, this is something I'm trying to continue with in the work I'm doing now—this high contrast, striking look—because I'm really interested in shadows and their shape. This ties back to what I said about not going full into representation and having the marks and the physical process in the piece. Shadows help me lead people's eyes.

SC: In your piece, “Because I see you as a body sees itself within a mirror,” you have a really cool division of reality and non-reality, it makes you look again. What was the process of making it?

FW: So, okay, I hate naming my artwork. If I could just leave all my artwork Untitled, I'd be fine with that. But with that one, I got the title from a movie, Ghosts in the Shell, a 1995 anime that deals with this dystopian, futuristic world where people and machines are intertwined in a really dark way; so the movie deals with humanity and what it means– my human-ness, like my human ghost. So I started thinking about what the value of human art even is, if there is a difference from AI generated stuff, so that was the question that I was asking with that painting. And I even used digital stuff to make the reference for the project, so that was cool.

I was trying to convey the physicality of being human through the tension of the figure. In the clothes you could see her stretching it and the hands are clenched, the feet are clenched, I'm trying to convey that anxiety. When you see the figure you see how tense she is and you can feel it in your own body too. I want to mimic that feeling, right? Anyway, that's what I was trying to accomplish with that pose. And with the mirror itself, I'm bringing it back to ghosts in the shell, like the ghost of a person, like the humanity of the person, what value it has. I know, it's really depressing.

*Because I see you as a body sees itself within a mirror*

SC: How have you coped with that?

FW: I'm trying to develop that shift in my ongoing work. I actually have another reference that I'm working on with photoshop and digital stuff. I mean, there's no way to really stop the AI train, right? But I'm just going to incorporate more digital stuff into my work; I think that's the way to go.

SC: How do you see yourself continuing your work?

FW: Mixing digital with traditional. I'm actually going way more into digital. I got into Photoshop last summer and I thought, oh my gosh, wow, look at this new medium, I have to explore it. It refreshed something in my way of thinking about art and gave me so much freedom to make mistakes and focus on other details when creating.

SC: Talking about AI, how do you think that art exists as digital vs. physical?

FW: You can't really bring the digital into the physical world completely. That's why I haven't completely abandoned it. But being able to experiment with digital stuff, not having any boundaries, it just opened the doors towards so many different possibilities. This eternal anxiety and fear ended up doing me good.

Forest and I walked back together to campus, where she had to get to the studio to work on some pieces and I had to catch up on some readings. The sunset permeated the sky on 114th street and, an hour and a half later, the conversation was done. To see more of Forest’s work, her instagram is @forestwongart.

Pranavi Khaitan

March 28, 2023

Feature by Mara Toma
Photos by Wynona Barua

Pranavi Khaitan (she/her) is a sophomore at Barnard College studying Urban Studies and Economics. Originally from New Delhi, India, her photographs explore the distinct and complex relationship between people and their surroundings. Photography is a way in which she defines and redefines spaces while also exercising gratitude and awareness towards the intrinsic characteristics of each lived experience. Her photography is a powerful reminder of how we each experience and process ordinary encounters in distinct ways.

Mara Toma – What got you into photography?

Pranavi Khaitan– I started off with photography at quite a young age. I got a DSLR camera as a birthday gift and it turned into a passion of mine. It began by photographing national parks in India: mainly birds and wildlife. My father loves the environment of national parks, so my family would go on a trip every New Year. I would take out my dusty camera and take a few pictures. When I was looking through the camera, I processed the world differently. It gave me a sense of wonder to look at the world around me and see what’s going on– sometimes it could be as simple as seeing fishermen through nets in a coastal town in India.

MT– You mentioned that you link the act of photography with the act of noticing. How does noticing play into your work?

PK– For me, freezing that moment or noticing a specific part of that moment evokes newness, uniqueness, and the ability to highlight the extraordinary. I deeply enjoy looking at the world this way. It's refreshing. My photography evolves as my interests change. For example, I had a period when I was very interested in Mughal history… I realized that the city I was living in was a hub for Mughal architecture. When you live in Delhi, you drive past these monuments every day. It’s the idea of reminding people that this exists. That's where I'm coming from: being able to show that daily life does not have to be mundane, it can incite excitement and wonder.

MT– You described photography in relation to your own shifting sense of self. Do you think you are trying to immortalize moments or bits of a changing personal and collective landscape?

PK– I am not trying to immortalize anything. My work highlights that places change, people change, things are moving, and things are happening around me. I aim to embrace change and understand the environment around me. It’s about highlighting my perspective which changes as time passes. One moment I could be focusing on monuments in Delhi: to highlight the role that this part of history played in shaping my city and the art in all its beauty. Another moment could be trying to understand my peers. I had a point where I was just taking pictures of things that were happening in my school. I think that my practice developed a lot as I grew and saw how I could use photography to display my perspective. I don't think I'm trying to highlight anything specifically— but that’s also the beauty of it.

In the beginning, my priority was that my pictures needed to be extremely aesthetic— perfect picture, perfect structure, capturing this impressive moment. And then I realized there was more to it than that. I had to be just as embedded in it as the viewer, and that’s when the world gained more meaning. Highlighting my high school experience, history, or just trying to capture the moments that I felt were important to my narrative. Today, when I'm trying to capture moments in New York, it's more about moments that seem so exciting, but that also don’t need to be perfect. Embracing imperfections or flaws has become a very important part of it for me. I don’t tell my subject to pose in a particular way or do something, it’s more about the fact that I will crack a joke in the middle or goof around. Being able to capture moments that reflect something candid and genuine makes me feel excited as an artist.

MT– Let’s delve deeper into the idea of a photograph transcending the act and becoming a lived experience. How do you materialize the relationship between yourself and the subjects you capture?

PK– The pictures that I take reflect a relationship between me and the subject which changes based on our closeness and familiarity to one another. In one picture, I captured a friend of mine. We were experiencing a moment of solitude and a feeling of aloneness. We were forming different parts of our identity but weren’t quite sure how to express that. We collaborated on this concept of turning aloneness into something physical. I did a photoshoot about body positivity—that series depended a lot on what I spoke about with my subject. I ended up having an interview process with the subjects, discussing their opinions, their feelings, their insecurities. But I also have pictures where I don't even know the person— photographing someone with whom I have no relationship whatsoever. When I look at my pictures, I get a sense of when I am connected to my subjects and when I am not. In fact, when engaging with any sort of photography, it is very interesting to reflect on whether there is a sense of familiarity or personalization. As far as my identity influencing the picture, when I am photographing, it is very much coming from my perspective and what I want from that moment. I am in control of that, there is a lot of decision-making that goes into that—the framing of the picture, the structure of it, how I like to filter it. All those decisions reflect my perspective of them.

MT–Place and the construction of place are central themes in your photographs. How does the experience of being a resident of New Delhi influence how your identity gets communicated in your photographs?

PK- I have a big attachment to the city that I'm from. Towards my later high school years, I got attached to the idea of displaying everyday people in Delhi. Especially cities in India– it’s easy to take for granted the people and services around you. Being a developing country, the informality of it all inhibits you from appreciating certain parts of daily life. I got very attached to the stories that created Delhi—and back then it came from a need for political activism. Hindu nationalism is a current issue in India. When I was photographing, there were major controversies surrounding the government renaming monuments or highlighting monuments that were made by Hindu People. This meant letting go of a major part of history or framing it as the work of “invaders''. My work was very much in response to that rhetoric. The idea of colonialism is very different to the Mughal rulers—they settled here, colonizers did not. For me, it was very important to highlight that in a way that I could. My photography takes on various approaches, so I don’t have one singular ideology behind it. It evolves as it goes and I enjoy that as well—I don’t want it to be a specific thing, I want it to be fluid.

MT– Would you say then that your work revolves around the constant process of defining and redefining space?

PV– For me, It's taking a space that I'm very familiar with and either reclaiming that space for myself or reclaiming an identity I have, like being a Delhiite… or a prospective New Yorker. It’s taking that space and doing something to make it feel different to me; I try to rediscover something about that space that could either send out a message or highlight something that went unnoticed before, or at least something that went unnoticed by me and others. A lot of it is how I am processing spaces, people interacting with these spaces, and most importantly what it could mean to people who are in those spaces. You don’t realize how much value a space or an object has until you see someone interacting with it in front of your eyes or frozen on the screen. It gives you a perspective of valuing things that may otherwise go unvalued or unnoticed.

MT– I like how you describe actively witnessing people interacting with these spaces as a part of how you relate to them. Would it be accurate to say that you are looking at these spaces as processes rather than as physical realities?

PK– Especially when exploring identity, the beauty of photography is that you get a sense of someone’s background or where they are coming from. I really enjoy exploring that, especially with backgrounds unlike mine– spaces that are unfamiliar, also those that are familiar. Seeing a person in everyday spaces that they use gives you a window into their life– it speaks to their background, and their identity. Especially today, it’s so important to find a lens through which you gain a little bit of understanding of someone else's identity. I think recognizing that diversity in experience, and making it both comfortable and interesting to look at is something that interests me.

MT– Your work has a very clear frame while also being playful and spontaneous – you include serendipitous occurrences like a beautiful streak of light, or an unexpected movement. Do you embrace randomness?

PK— Definitely. I am visiting places and taking photos randomly— It's always fate. The moment is not planned, but I am controlling how I experience it, how I view it, and how I can make others view it is exciting to me. I love spontaneity, it gives me flexibility to try new things and be whimsical. It makes me grow a lot as a photographer to not have a set idea of things and to recognize that sometimes moments will just not work— the not so great pictures that I have taken are also a part of that process. Photography is a fun thing for me and I hope that is reflected in my photos. I am not very serious— I enjoy the randomness and the challenge that comes with it – I ask myself: can I make a good picture out of this, can I capture this in an interesting way? Randomness gives me that freedom to explore, and it adds to the naturalism of it, the idea that this moment is true.

MT– Speaking of embracing the intrinsic elements of each environment, how has moving to New York influenced your photographic style?

In New York, I have been intrigued by capturing contrasts through spaces. For instance, I find Riverside Park fascinating because it is in such deep contrast with its surrounding environment. Photography allows me to get to know the city… feel closer to it. For instance, I did a photoshoot in Queens, and it allowed me to explore a different part of New York that I am not as used to. In the space that I looked at in Queens, it was a very different feel from Manhattan or the Financial district… I would love to get more time to explore the city with my camera and try to learn more about each space. Doing that enhances my experience of New York– it’s my way of processing and appreciating these new spaces.

MT – We keep circling back to this idea of processing or reckoning with different spaces. Would you say that photography allows you to practice gratitude towards people, spaces, and places?

PK– Photography brings me an immediate sense of awareness for the things around me. Through photography, I am able to recognize things, and feel closer to them whether it be people in that space, the space in itself, objects, or things that I find intrinsically unique about that space. That’s what it is for me… it is an enhancement of the experience and a way in which I exercise gratitude for the ordinary– whether it be to a space or a person that I happen to connect to…

Watson Frank

March 10, 2023

Feature by Sadie Hornung-Scherr

Photos by Kendall Bartel

Artist Watson Frank uses themes of nature, animals, and the hidden world of the Earth in their art. Watson doesn’t constrain themself to just one medium. They use charcoal, animation, watercolor, printmaking, and collage in their practice. When I asked why they use so many mediums, Watson said “When I was in high school, I only took AP Studio Art, no foundational classes, which means I never focused on one medium. During COVID, my art making became mostly self driven. It made me ask myself ‘What do I have access to?’ and ‘What can I learn from what I have access to?’ I had access to drawing tools, painting tools, cutting and collaging tools, and some digital tools. Then I asked myself ‘What can I do with all of this?’ I've always just been interested in this feeling of how different ways of making can help express different ideas.

Watson believes that certain concepts and ideas are executed best in a specific medium. “The choice of mediums should serve the concept, rather than the concept being filtered through the medium.” For Watson experimenting with different mediums is an intrinsic part of the complexity in their work and it’s part of what makes their work distinct.

Their ideas are sometimes best served by charcoal, sometimes by watercolor. But whatever the medium is, Watson is intentional. While their lack of access during quarantine turned out to be a blessing in disguise, this constraint of access also pushed them to explore certain themes and ideas. Watson describes: “If I'm in an art class, say a printmaking class, I have to use the print to make whatever I'm going to do. So then I only conceptualize ideas that I think are served best by printmaking. Since prints are easily mass produced and they have connections to children's stories, I would try to make something that challenges the medium of printmaking.” Watson also paints which allows them to think about what ideas they would want to express through printmaking versus painting makes me think about how I can make two different things interact. But that's where things get really interesting, where those boundaries are blurred. This speaks to the whole lie of "Oh, you can't make anything new." There's so much still out there that hasn't been made or explored. I think those unexplored ideas exist in gray areas of medium. When someone says, "I'm a painter" I think an artist limits themself. Sure, you can become a master painter but I don't think mastery is the end goal. I don't think mastery is even possible.”

I think Watson was right when they said art can always be new. Watson did a piece called “To the Worm That First Gnawed at My Corpse”. This work is new and is fundamentally Watson. It is a mishmash of medium-charcoal and animation. The piece quotes a dedication from Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas: “To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these Posthumous Memoirs.” Inspired by Bras Cubas, Watson explores the regenerative nature of death. The piece asks what a life cycle is, exploring with medium the questions raised. Watson commented on the piece, “ I wrote a short story called "An Addendum to the Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas." I fell in love with this idea of a conscious worm. I was really interested in this idea of worms being agents of death, but also creators of life cycles. So I had this story and I decided I wanted to draw something connected to worms for my art class. I decided to make an animation instead. It started as this idea of showing how a worm consumes a dead body. As I was making it, it grew on its own. The piece told me what it needed. I found my best work comes when I let the art live and grow on its own. So then it became more of a self reflection through this character of the worm. In this case, using animation allowed this piece to grow in ways I never would’ve thought of myself.”

To The Worm That First Gnawed At My Corpse

In this, we see Watson’s dedication to a meaningful medium. The work needed to be communicated in charcoal animation so the artist did exactly that.

To Watson, inspiration is everywhere. This inspiration necessitates artistic investigation of one’s work and oneself: “It [inspiration] comes and goes and it depends. Since I've been in New York City, I've become a lot more aware of my connection to nature and how much I care about nature and how much I miss it. I took a creative writing class called Animal Tales my freshman year with Annalise Chen. The whole class is thinking about how humans use animals as symbols and how we see so much of ourselves in animals. That really informed my writing. Because I spent so much time doing that in my writing, it trickled into my visual art. I became obsessed with what plants and animals have to offer to art. Animals show up a lot in fables and children's stories but, why is that? What is it about animals and that style and that connection to our basic minds? What is it about that that's so appealing? I think there's something so fascinating there. Also, I think in so many different mythologies animals are the foundation of the natural world. Why is it that? I almost see it appear in all of my classes. Why is it that we always go back there and what can we learn from that? What can I learn from that? What can I learn about myself from that?”.

Watson is an artist who intentionally considers every part of the artistic process, be it medium, inspiration, or the artist themselves. Watson was a breath of fresh air in a pedantic world of posturing. Watson is genuine and so is their art. You can find more of Watson’s work on their site, https://watsonfrank.cargo.site/, and instagram, @wat_is_the_world.

Max Patel

March 10, 2023

Feature by Claire Killian

Photos by Grace Li

Max Patel, who goes by the stage name Jayani, is a senior at Columbia College studying business and music. Jayani is an independent singer-songwriter born in Hong Kong living in NYC. Blending soulful vocals with sensory imagery and minimalistic production, Jayani’s sound can be likened to artists such as Bruno Major, Mac Ayres, and Jeremy Passion among others. With the mission to tap into authentic emotions, Jayani has released 14 songs on Spotify with a debut album “Songs of the Storm” coming soon!

Let's start at the beginning, and talk a little bit about your personal history of music, how you came to it and when you started. Did you grow up in a particularly musical household?

My household wasn't particularly musical. I started by doing chorus, though I didn’t do it for a while because I thought it was nerdy. I started listening to different kinds of music. My friends and I were singing songs on the school bus. I heard T-Pain one time and I thought, ‘this is absolutely insane. I have to do this.’ I didn't realize he was using autotune, but I wanted to sound like him. I would go to talent shows, just at the school and then sing his little riffs. I would practice and then people would say, ‘oh man, you're really good.’

And I'd think, ‘oh, I'm really good!’ like, ‘I should do this.’ I just started doing more, when I got the affirmations, I started doing chorus because I felt good enough to join. Then, I started playing with little bands, my friends would do an a capella band, and I would join in. Then my friend played drums and guitar, so we'd do different covers and just sing songs around campus. My last year of middle school I had this passion, project opportunity and I thought, ‘I'm gonna start writing a song, and we'll see how this goes.’ At the time, I was moving away from Hong Kong - where I grew up - just to come to boarding school in America. So, I was leaving home, really moving away from everything I knew. I wanted to write a song about that. The song Moondrops came from that. At the beginning I was kind of skeptical of myself, but the more and more I performed it, and sang it, it became so real to me. I performed it at the graduation from middle school, and then everyone was waving their hands, it was just so beautiful. I wanted to do more of that. Actually, I released that song Moondrops in my recent album. There's a version on YouTube, which is me, a capella, in some random studio in Hong Kong. I was just doing beatboxing, a few ‘oos’ here and there, and then I remastered it, put some instrumentation in.

Okay, so when you are writing a song and then performing it, what does your creative process look like?

I usually start with the chords. I know some people start with lyrics, some people start with melody. For me, I sing the words while making the melody, so they're kind of intertwined - the meaning of the song with how it sounds. It's usually around the guitar chord. I’ll usually either have a thing that I want to talk about or an emotion that's pressing that I need to get out and then run with what’s on my mind.

Are there any examples that come to mind when you think about an idea that you wanna get out?

Yeah! On the album there's a song called “Break the Fall”, and that's a breakup song. I think breakup songs, and sad songs, are really easy because you feel sad, and you want to get it out there. I feel like it's only satisfying when you feel like you target the emotion that you're trying to get at. If you feel a certain type of way, like you're mad but sad, and you're mad at this person, you have to ask ‘why are you mad at this?’ For example, if they broke up with you and they didn't call you, then that’s why you’re mad - expressing that in words, and then also giving it a melody that feels good to sing.

When you're singing or writing a song, or really at any stage in the musical process - is that a highly emotional experience for you? Is it very removed? What's going through your head? What are you feeling?

It depends on the song. Especially in writing it's an usually vulnerable situation - especially if it's a sad song. I don't like to write songs around people that much. I mean, I like to collaborate, but that’s different. A lot of my songs are happy. I try to imbue my songs with a spirit of ‘live in the moment.’ To make it clear that things are going to be okay. A lot of the time I'm just trying to have a good time writing songs. If they're sad, then they get vulnerable.

One of the things that's always impressed me about performing artists, whether it's theater or music, like anyone who's doing art live and in person, is the confidence aspect of it. The audience is literally reacting live to what you're doing and, in a fun way you get to interact with them, but also I'm sure very frightening sometimes. What is that like for you? The whole like live performance dynamic?

I love it - because I feel like you never know what people like, unless you're there. They're out there with you. If you rehearse the set, you know certain things that you want to do in certain parts of the song, but you’ll only know if they resonate by trying it and then looking out at the audience and seeing how they respond. When I'm singing a sad song, though, at least recently it's been hard for me to be as vulnerable. Recently I've been performing on bigger stages, and with a band, and I don't want to bring the vibe down. I feel when I'm singing a sad song, I'm worried about making people sad. Generally I just love performing in front of a live audience, and it just feels really nice.

Pertaining to your larger audiences, when someone's listening to your music, whether it's live or on their own, listening to Spotify, is there anything that you want them to come away with? Any particular experience you want them to have? Like what do you want the listener to go through?

Generally I want to impart a sense of ‘let's make the most of today. I always wanna have a positive spirit if I am impacting somebody. I want to go to some deep places with my music and have deep feelings, but I want to always come back out. I don't want to leave people in a sad place. A lot of my music is just purely happy. For example, Covid came, and everything stopped, but it wasn’t a total stop, it was like a pause. Whatever people come away from my music with, I want them to have a sense that it’s going to be alright. The song “Face To Face” is about how sometimes I feel like I ‘don't need another day as long as you're here with me.’ Just about appreciating that friend, or that person in your life. Like, let's have fun even though it's a pandemic. Stuff like that. Hopefully that message comes across and if not, then hopefully they enjoy the song, and if it's a sad song, then hopefully like they felt that, they felt the emotion they needed to feel, and not that they need to stay in it.

Is songwriting for you a catharsis, or an outlet? Or is it more of a practice, like a technical exploration?

I know for a lot of people it's both, but for me it's definitely mostly been a catharsis. The second half of my music journey is when I got to Choate, the boarding school. One of my friends passed away, and I started really writing songs about that. Just coping with it. I hadn't really had a personal project, it was just like that one song in Hong Kong. Then I wrote these personal songs in this church, like in this chapel, by this piano. I didn’t even know how to play it. I was just playing these keys, and I just needed to sing, I needed to get it out. Then I performed the songs at this random coffee shop. People thought my set was really meaningful. I wanted to do more of that. So, it definitely started with catharsis and still whenever I'm sad, I'll just go to a dark room and play with my guitar, or play with the piano, and just sing. Honestly, even when I'm not sad, sometimes I'm just mad or overwhelmed or I'm excited.

It seems like community response, and the community that you've grown up in, has been a huge part of your art. Growing up as a third culture kid, and having the Hong Kong base, but also having traditional European and Hindustani music backgrounds, how can we see that in your music?

In high school I tried musical theater. I was in chorus and taking classical lessons. I started in Indian music, like Indian classical music lessons. Then at Columbia I started jazz. So I'm just really interested in exploring what's out there musically, and seeing what I'm drawn to. Obviously, I'm drawn to all of it. I think it's all great I'm always looking for ways that I can incorporate it authentically. I don't want to just make an Indian song to be like, ‘I'm half Indian guys, here's my Indian song.’ But I want to incorporate it because I think it's really cool. I'm definitely trying to keep on growing that journey. I have a lot of influences from training, and just from learning and listening, that I want to bring in to make music that is more diverse.

What's most challenging for you when you're creating any piece of music?

Probably self-doubt, and I think like a lot of artists might feel this way too. Whenever you're making something like, ‘is this good? Are people going to like this?’ That only comes in after I've finished the initial song, and then I'm trying to make it better. That's probably the hardest thing for me. I’m trying to make it good, but what is good? Because everyone has a different taste.You can't appease every taste, or appeal to everybody.

Do you feel like that comes from a place of, ‘are they technically going to like this? Is this a well produced song?’ Or is it coming from a place of, ‘this is a very personal, vulnerable piece of art for me and if you reject it, that's in some way rejecting me.’

I feel that my songs are really meaningful to me, and if someone doesn't like it, it's gonna hurt me.’ It’s cooler to think that, but I think for me it's more that I really want people to like it, and whether or not I put something out there that's meaningful to me and people don't like it, I'll be like, okay, cool. Like, ‘you will like other music and that's fine. I'll also have my music.’ At the same time, I really want to make stuff that people genuinely like. Because I know anyone in my life might praise me, but if someone else out there is gonna be like, ‘wow, I actually liked your song. That really meant something to me.’ Then that's what matters to me. I want to have more of those moments and create things that are meaningful to people.

You’re very well ensconced in an art community on campus. Other singer-songwriters, C.U. Records, MIC - what's that like for you? Working with other creatives, other young artists?

It's really nice. A lot of my friends are doing their own stuff, like Rommel with his video and Jane with her photography. All these people are pursuing music and creativity in their own facets. I think it's really refreshing and inspiring, whenever someone has a win, it feels like a win in my book too. We're all in this together. Eva Westphal is a good friend of mine, and she's blowing up, playing these amazing venues, playing The Mercury Lounge and it's inspiring. When I see friends who are not at a public level, I tell them ‘You can be.’ I'll help them, and that will take the form of getting them a gig, or finding them a band, something like that. I feel like we're all part of the same community and we wanna help each other.

I just wanted to ask if there was anything that we didn't get to talk about that you wanted to bring up?

That's a good question. I'm not sure if I told you about the origin of Jayani? My stage name? It’s my grandfather’s name. He grew up in Gujarat, India. His grandfather worked closely with Gandhi. Generally he was well-renowned in that village. When he came to America, he had to change his name to Patel, because of immigration policies. So I just wanted to bring that name forward, to pay homage. That's why I use it as an artist name.

Jayani’s Music is available on all major streaming platforms.

Cadence Gonzales

March 10, 2023

Feature by Raunak Lally

Photos by Anais Mitelberg

Cadence Gonzales is a first-year at Barnard who primarily paints both using paint and digital media to create. She has been creating art since her school days and has playfully indexed her creative journey by who she has used as references for her colorful and intricate works.

Go ahead and introduce yourself!

I'm Cadence, I'm a Barnard first-year, I'm from New Mexico, and I'm planning on majoring in Political Science – and I do art, too!

Where would you say that your creative journey began? What drew you to creating portraiture and art in general?

I've been drawing since I was a little kid and it was all terrible. Absolutely terrible. There was no trace of talent anywhere. In seventh grade, it's really embarrassing – my art journey starts off with anime – so get ready for that. I was twelve, in my closet, tracing on my computer because I thought that it was a horrific thing to do, that I was tracing. I would go to school the next day and say "look at this! Look what I just did!"

Fast forward, over the course of four years, I was drawing little cartoons and I was getting more and more into comic style. I was using markers and pens, that's my bread and butter. I hadn’t painted – I think I’d only painted one time, and that was a very poorly done Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, an aggressively poorly done Stitch. I had taken AP Art, and the first time I did comic style, it was political commentary. I did well on the test, felt good about it. Then I took AP Drawing, so I just got to take the class again and still get the AP credit! I visited Washington D.C. with my family and went to the National Portrait Museum, where they have all the presidential portraits, and I was thinking about what my theme was going to be, so I said I would just try that, and, lo and behold, I did and it has literally changed my artistic journey forever - by just picking up a paintbrush and just seeing whatever the heck happens next. I absolutely loved the fact that it's been on my own terms and it's amazing for little kid Cadence, who struggled.I can take pride in that feeling of ‘oh we can create things now,’ and not just because other people like them but because it makes my brain feel good to see things coming together. It's been really awesome to start a new challenge and develop new skills along the way since I'm not formally trained.

Moving on from your school journey, during your time in college so far, has this current stage of your life influenced your work in any way?

I wish I was one of the really awesome artists I admire who can stick to themes, but I'm still figuring it out and I don't know if I'll ever have one. What I've really loved about school is being an illustrator for the Blue & White, so whatever they give me, I think to myself, "Okay, I guess I'll draw it for you – I'll do my best." This extracurricular involvement has actually allowed me to have more creative freedom, but I don't have space for all of my giant canvases and my 49¢ Michaels paint. Now I just have my tablet, and it's been expanding my horizons of digital media. There are all these things involved with digital art: there's layering and color gradients and I don't know what to do with that. I try to paint as I normally would, but digitally – which is beside the point of digital art, but I really love the progress that I've been able to make here, and it's been an amazing study break. I'll read 100 pages, theoretically I'll retain them, and then I'll paint for 3 hours.

Across your distinct works, when you decide on a subject for a painting, what might inspire you to choose that certain subject?

When I was in my AP Art era, my concentration was on my political role models, as politics are very intertwined into who I am, what I believe in, and what I want to do. That led to Stacey Abrams portraits, Ruth Bader Ginsberg portraits, John Lewis portraits, and I felt like I put more emotional coinage in those. Now, I am choosing things that I find challenging. I love a really good challenge, and love to 'struggle bus' through it, in the words of Trixie Mattel. I don't have any typical process, my stuff is all over the place, but it's good fun!

You mentioned that you also create digital art, which mediums do you work with?

I've primarily been using digital art, my comic book and anime art has made me pretty well-versed in pencil and ink. I've tried to get into gouache, but then my gouache set got absolutely ruined because I don't know how to take care of it, and then acrylic paint after that.

When you have a piece in your head, how do you go about selecting which medium to use to depict your vision since you have this broad range?

It's usually based on what's nearby and what's the least amount of effort! I could clean my gouache palette, but I won't.

I remember you speaking previously about having little to no knowledge of color theory before you got into art. Because of the striking nature of your works, is color theory something that you've taken into account when creating? If not, how do you go about deciding on the palette for a piece?

I still don't know color theory! Some of the magic would leave if I did. Color is very important to my work. I find that painting in grayscale is cool, but I don't feel it. I used this term in my application: I'm a very selfish painter – I really chase whatever makes my brain feel "wow, this is amazing, Cadence, I'm so proud of you, that's awesome!" So, when it comes to color, it's in the same vein. I'll look back at some of my timelapses of my digital art and it will be very two-toned greyscale with some values, but then my brain will just go "what if we put some nice blue in there?" That's where it comes from. I like it because there isn't any sort of rigid law that I have to abide by, but also it's just good recreational time for my brain to exercise and figure out which colors I want to choose, and it adds an abstract element to my art.

I love the term 'selfish painter!' Is there anything else that you would want anyone to think about when viewing your work or a type of impression you're trying to communicate, or is it purely something you create for self-pleasure?

In my AP Art era, it was definitely message-conveying and very summative of my relationship to the person I was painting, but also their relationship to history and the world around them. I'm very new to this—I’ve never had anyone interview me about my art, and I've never thought of myself as an artist. A lot of what I do is for me to say "look at where I've come from and look at where I am right now," and this is something that my brain created and I'm really happy about that, there’s this aspect of self-love that's involved. I also love the friendship aspect of creating for other people, and visualizing things for people that I really enjoy.

The portraiture you create is so amazing and detailed, do you view it as a form of replicating what you see if you're using a reference or specific subject, or, if not, how might your pieces differ from a reference?

I always start off with the reference. I've gone away from my tracing roots, even though I don't think tracing is a bad thing. I've moved away from my pencil sketch roots too, and gone straight into painting because the painting becomes – and this is going to sound so artsy and weird – but it becomes more living if you can shape it almost as if it's clay. There comes a point where shaping it to look like the reference and values is important, but then there comes a point where I don't care about that and it all comes into that free-flowing version of what my brain is interpreting. I see that something is being communicated there, but I'm not getting it through the values, so I ask "can I try red? That works there." From that point on, it goes into thinking about what other weird extra things I can add, such as way too many highlights or all of these weird lines around it. It's very experimental, and I can say that many of my paintings will not match the reference when they're done, whether that's because of proportion or color.

Is there anything style-wise or related to the process that you see tying your pieces together, even though many use distinct subjects? Do you see any stark differences that may set your pieces apart?

I use my zero-understanding of color theory as a crutch, hoping that everything will look synonymous and turn out okay. What that lends to all of my pieces is that there’s this foundation rooted in traditional art, colors, and values that are very underdeveloped compared to the reference. Then, what will come in, is something that unites all of my pieces - which is this messy, uncoordinated use of shapes and colors and brush textures that add a lot of character. Those additions are not only true to what I'm trying to communicate through my art – which is whatever the heck that is – but are also true to me, my personality, and how I view the world - because I chase joy! I chase fun stuff, I'm a selfish painter, but the way it communicates across my art is this interesting study, when you take a look back at all of them, in color, abstract lines, and how two colors work together, like blue and green or white or something weird. How does that form in my mind and make sense? Why does it do that? I don't know, but it looks cool!

Do your color palette or texture choices ever align with the subject within the piece, or is it a spontaneous decision? What might your planning process and the development of your inspiration look like?

I'll use my first ever painting as an example, which is my Joe Biden painting. I feel complicated about that being my first painting, and also my favorite painting; I'm not a Joe Biden hater but, I don't know about it, man. Anyways, the way I started that one was a process of trying to match colors as closely as possible, and matching that form to get to some sort of a traditional realist painting. Then there's a real process of giving up at some point or changing trajectories – that's a better term for it– where I just go crazy with it. Something that is not necessarily unique to me, but is a very core aspect of myself as an academic and an artist, is that I'm a major procrastinator. I have the weakest attention span ever in the world, so my paintings are done in sittings. My Joe Biden painting took four to six hours, and all my other paintings have to be done in one sitting too, otherwise I can't go back to them. When I have that sort of process, it's more of a battle with my mind and trying to figure out what makes sense, and figure out if I'm convincing myself that it makes sense or if it doesn't.There's just this balance between my foundations and understandings of realism and what things should look like, but also how my brain interprets it, and what I have on hand, and also what it is that I want to do. There's no distinct process. Sometimes I really crave and wish to have one, because I have portraiture, but then I also have more personal projects like the comics, because my foundations for art are in comics. Sometimes it can be a little frustrating when my art style is based on the sentiment 'let's go in and see what we can find out' and then four hours later, I'll have something. However, when you're doing something that's tight-knit like comics, I would prefer to have a sketch, then an inking, and then a color, but I can't get those done as easily, so it's an interesting journey.

On the comic process, do you also write the narrative or is it purely illustrative for you?

It's been a little passion project of mine since I was eight. Everyone always has that one story they had created when they were eight, and thinks 'this is my cool fantasy story that I made with my toys,' and I have had that in my brain forever. I'm really big on inner-child work, into chasing joy, and what baby Cadence would've wanted. Right now, they're just illustrations, but it's interesting with something that doesn't have a reference, like an original character that you came up with, then it's about how you communicate that with the rough and intangible image in your brain – it's difficult and it's something that I want to connect more into my art.

It's so interesting how your interest in politics is integral to your work, and that your first painting was of Joe Biden and you mentioned that there could be an intersection for you between art and politics. What do you think that combination looks like? s that something you're already incorporating into your art?

The easy answer is making political cartoons, and I did do that for a little bit. This is not going to be joint with politics at all, but fitting with the nature of me being a selfish painter, a lot of what I'm starting to get into with my painting – that is more than just a painting of Joe Biden – is an exploration of my feelings about him and his work, more of painting being an outlet. This sounds very basic, but straight-up expressing myself and also processing things, so I want to try understanding my feelings or my past through painting.

If you had to sum up your style or your art or anything to do with your creative process in one word, what would that be?

Disorganized!

Do you have any other projects coming up, either something you're planning or something you're working on?

I've been working on exploring color more. I've already explored color a lot, but I've really taken a turn from just working with traditional skin tones or texture, and being more abstract but hopefully not losing too much form. We'll see where it goes!

Carlos Sánchez-Tatá

March 4, 2023

Feature by Iker Veiga

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

Carlos Sánchez-Tatá is a junior studying Art History and Visual Arts at Columbia College. His work oscillates between abstraction and portraiture, and explores the tensions between queerness and his Venezuelan heritage. Through his musical, vibrant style, Carlos enchants the viewer, inviting them to take part in a moment of absolute ecstasy. We met via Zoom to discuss healing, passion, and being an artist in New York City.

Can you talk about your first memories making art?

I have always drawn and been interested in the arts. However, the first time I put thought into what I wanted to draw, I was in high school. Most of those pieces actually give me the ick today, though. My high school work was super dramatic. Back then, I used painting to explore my past trauma, so I included many references to Catholicism, which made my art very dark, and even bloody.

Did you heal through art?

It depends on what you define as healing. I try to empower myself through painting. It’s more about healing after seeing the result, rather than creating just so that I can move on. Art is one of the things that I know how to do well, therefore, in order to heal, I try to make something that I’m proud of. The process of creating is healing in itself, so I don’t often explicitly depict scenes that overwhelm me. Nevertheless, many of the topics I touch upon in my pieces do come from my own insecurities. I usually draw inspiration from themes that I’m obsessed with, that have saturated my thoughts and drained me emotionally. The charged energy of the paintings comes from my own self-awareness and restlessness. Sometimes my pieces are really sexual, sometimes they’re very busy, but there is always a tinge of anxiety to them. In order to fully capture and exploit the solitude I feel, I don’t tend to represent multiple people in one piece.

How do you explore such personal topics through portraits of other people?

At first I used to draw myself because I was the only model I had access to. I committed to self-portraiture for the longest time during high school, and my best pieces of that time are without a doubt self-portraits, but you cannot draw yourself in every work because it gets boring. As my work matured, I began to depict other people, and I soon gravitated towards queer people. It became more interesting to make these people a reflection of my consciousness. Through my models’ physicalities I am able to express narratives similar to mine in other subjects.

I believe that most of my paintings are about fifty different things, so it’s hard for me to narrow down what each of them is doing on its own. My portraits are not just representations of one person, because there are many factors in the background that complicate the situation depicted. In my work I am also trying to world-build, mainly through abstractions that seize the energy of my subjects.

Can you elaborate on the relationship between queerness and your art?

When I was in high school, I struggled to represent my identity in my art. I tried to capture what I obsessed over, but my desires always conflicted with my Catholic surroundings. Nonetheless, when I got to college, I realized that I could create art that not only represented queerness, but also celebrated it, and that is what makes my newer work more joyful. Being queer is super difficult, especially in New York City. It is super lonely and intense, but it is also colorful. The passion you feel is so rich when you are queer, especially coming from a family who are just assholes about it.

There is a particular painting, one with a drip (like my professor calls it) that my friends call a “sex painting.” As sexual as “Wild Anticipation” is, it carries a bigger meaning than that. That painting was a huge breakthrough for me at the moment because it made me confront my sexuality. It had a lot of personal narrative to it, and it represented an absolute climax. It is about passion, it is about love.

You can see my queerness evolve through my art. A year later, I made “The Greatest Fox Hunt,” a painting of my boyfriend, and this one was not as sexual: it was about capturing passion in a different way. Even though in my work, people usually take up the roles I want them to take, it was different in this one. In this piece, the character was not someone that I could fulfill. Since he’s someone I have a relationship with, this painting is not about me: it’s about us.

How can we see your background clashing with your queer identity in your art?

I lived in Venezuela until I was 6 years old, which inherently made my upbringing a lot more colorful. Venezuelan people are a lot more artistic than they think; they are also funnier than what they think, which has really helped me. Even if someone looks at my work and thinks that they are all serious pieces, humor is the only thing that has helped me besides art itself. My surroundings were also extremely Catholic while growing up, which conflicted with my identity and with the stories I want to tell through my art.

In spite of this, I cannot ignore the influence that Catholicism has on my art. Even if my portraits don’t display it directly, there is a big religious inspiration that I drew from the images of Saints I was exposed to while growing up. In fact, one of the reasons why I am also studying art history is because of my passion for Medieval Christian art. I took a class with Gregory Bryda that I loved, where I learned about symbolism, which characterizes my work now. At first, the inspiration I drew from religion came from a place of pain, because Christianity was not the place where I wanted to be. But now that I have clawed myself out of it, even if my influences come from elsewhere, religious motifs still make it into my work.

One of my favorite artists is Naudline Cluvie Pierre. Her work is mythological, but it looks religious, and she often presents the viewers with moments of climax, which is something I do as well. I want you to witness a moment of greatness. And that is so religious!

I am still trying to reconcile myself with Catholicism, because I can’t just be like “I hate Jesus,” and move on. I look at, for example, Ethel Cain, and I realize that she’s not only satirizing religion, but also dealing with her own religious trauma, and that is something I must do, as much as it scares me, because it underlies most of my paintings.

What techniques do you use to create these moments of greatness?

Sometimes, even when it’s good, modern art can be really fucking awful - but when it is very good, it is not boring. My technique is not perfect, but the one thing I don’t want is to bore people with my work. Basically because I don’t want to bore myself making it either. I try to use a vibrant color palette to achieve this.

For a long period of time I was obsessed with using very rich magentas and yellows, because to me they are the colors of passion. When I combined them, the intensity was unmatched; it felt like a summer garden blooming. If I think of paradise, greatness, and passion, those colors immediately come to mind. Unfortunately, I recently realized that using that palette was driving me to a block. So even though it was truly inspiring, in my recent work I have moved away from it and have started using more blues and greens.

When I started painting, I didn’t plan my work out beforehand and just went for it.” You can clearly see this in “A Morning When I Felt Beautiful.” This piece was also a breakthrough in my production, because when I painted it, I didn’t know how to create an abstracted world yet. With that piece, I began to learn how to balance figure and background, which has defined my artistic persona ever since. Nevertheless, that was also sort of limiting, because in the end I was trying to represent subjects in extremely ungrounded and unrealistic worlds which was draining creatively. At some point, my works began to feel as if I was just creating an abstract background and putting a person up forefront. So recently I have been working on improving my compositions, which can be seen in my recent work.

The more serious I have become about painting, the more I have realized that I still have a lot left to learn. There is always something wrong with paintings; they are never perfect. I never feel like I have mastered my craft. Even when people appreciate my work, I don’t try to show off, but to learn. Everything I do is about exploring and listening to others.

Has your art-making process evolved as your technique changed?

My process always starts with music. It has been the catalyst of most of my art, and I believe it is what made me become an artist. Music inspired me to first explore the creative fields, and I still listen to music to create my abstractions: the movements I make, the brush strokes in my paintings. Everything comes from music. It invites me to be more generative, and to come up with more sharp, decorative bold shapes.

Unfortunately, the process of creating requires way more planning than that. I wish I could just go into a painting and make it out of spur moment. Some great abstract works have been made like that, but with portraiture, I must start with the idea I have of a person, understand the world they are in, and what they want to say. Sometimes they are just lying down, feeling confident. But they acquire a different meaning as I implement colors and shapes. Many of my professors at Columbia have helped me understand how to implement the spontaneity of my process into a structured plan to achieve grounded, energetic pieces that enrapture my audience.

You have mentioned how art classes have helped you grow as an artist. How is it like to be an aspiring artist both at Columbia and in the city?

I am really thankful for Columbia’s Visual Arts department. Even though it is a really small department, they do the best they can. Their classes are fabulous, and I love that I get to interact with a lot of MFA students in them. I think a lot of people who want to dive into visual arts at this school are too scared. I understand it, but it is also sad. Even though it is a really competitive field, I wish people would lean fully into their passions.

Being an artist in the city is really weird, because it makes you hopeful that you can be successful in an art career, even when people who are not in the world of the arts don’t fully understand the economics of it. But it is possible.

The advice I’ve gotten the most from other artists and professors is that I should be making more art right now, and putting it out there. But unfortunately, it is not like a STEM job, where you can find a job right after college. These jobs are riskier, and they don’t come that often. A lot of people support their art careers with a day job. So I will probably have a day job forever. This life makes you hustle a lot, and even though there are only very few opportunities coming my way, this is me. I am taking this seriously. Art is what I do professionally, and it is fucking hard sometimes. Because no one tells you how to make a name for yourself. It is something that I take really seriously and in the end is really hurtful and stressful for me.

Overall, I think that people don’t comprehend the arts as a career. I understand why, because it is hard to get money from it, and the process is not linear, but I am in too deep, and I cannot do any other career. So it is high stakes, but it is also more fun that way. I am confident in myself and my vision. I want to see my work hung in galleries and museums.

In the last few years, I have learned how to navigate and understand my own art, and everyday I see such a big improvement in my technique. I just wish there were more opportunities like Ratrock, to help people access freelance artists’ work. I hope I won’t be too broke for a while, but it is also more fun that way. You can’t be ultra successful all the time.

Where can the Ratrock readers find you and your art?

I have a website with my art. But my Instagram is what I am always on. So if anyone is interested in my art they can check me out @carlossancheztata. I am really pro-random people messaging me, so don’t doubt and DM me if you want to talk about art!

Julia Tolda

January 31, 2023

Feature by Mara Toma

Photos by Jane Mok

Julia (she/her) is a senior at Barnard studying comparative literature. She had arrived earlier than I had at Cafe Amrita, having settled herself at a receded outdoor table. Much like our conversation, this choice of seating enjoyed some form of serendipity: the loud honks of transiting trucks were not mere background noises but rather a selection of well-timed intermissions (necessary for aimless laughter, tangential conversation, even a little bit of uncertainty). After setting my bag down, Julia handed me a folder with some of her works. Maybe it was then, seeing her work not as a whole but also as details in between, that I understood her art as a need to capture a beauty complicated by the fleeting present. Her art boldly seeks that kind of beauty, navigating and modeling its interactions with fate, time, heartbreak, gaze, and love.

Mara Toma – What got you into collaging?

Julia Tolda — I went to very hippie schools until the 8th grade. A lot of our projects consisted of collaging so it has always been a big part of my art. In high school, I used to make pinterest boards and curate my Tumblr and Instagram. I got into collaging as it is now over the summer of 2021. I took a class called Francophone studies, and I really didn’t want to do anything for the final project. I talked to the professor and asked whether I could write two poems instead. She agreed under the condition that I also do something else. I told her that I do collage as well. I lied—I didn’t collage at all back then. But I did it! And it was so much fun. The first time I collaged it took me three hours and then after that for another class I did another poetry and collage, and it took me less time as I got better at it. All of those things led me to collaging, but it was a slow burn…

MT—Why collage?

JT– Some things are best captured by other people. I'm not a photographer but I have a good eye for design, curation, and putting things together. I like collaging because it helps me process things that exist in the world and put them together in a way that makes most sense to me—as opposed to going out and photographing or painting. It's a way to take up space that I find really intriguing. It’s bizarre because I'm using other people's work to create something that's mine, but isn't that all art?

MT– I love how you mention using people’s work to create something that is yours. Collage is a cyclical process of decontextualization and recontextualization of images. How does this process appear in your work?

JT—- I decontextualize and recontextualize things very often. I mostly undo the work that other people have done to create new meaning because it’s easier—it’s easier to make something new. I can do whatever I want when I take it out of context. In Still Your Girl, for example, I used a photograph from a Christian Dior ad for an opening sale. The ad features all these models who are sitting and wearing white and I just thought it would be so much more beautiful if I made them into little ghosts like the ones on Phoebe Bridgers’s Stranger in the Alps cover. I’ve taken it all out of context because none of it is the actual context.

I think about The Idiot by Elif Batuman. The fact that she named her book after The Idiot, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is so interesting. The entirety of that book is her going through other people's writings and trying to find herself—that's how I feel about art and beauty in the world. Collaging is a way to make sense of what I see in the world to me.

MT— You express yourself through writing as well. How do you think your engagement with different art forms influences your work?

JT: So I'm actually a writer first. I would say that I was a writer before I was a collage artist. I get made fun of by the people around me because I'm a lover of the narrative—I live my life as a little story. I love the plots. I love the characters. I love the symbolism. I’ll bring up a quote from a book that I read because it fits the narrative. Writing is central to me. When I weave the words together, I create something new with what's already there, what already exists.

I'm finding so many similarities between collaging and poetry as I speak. Both use things that exist to create something completely new. With poetry, there is more flexibility because I can choose whatever words I want while with collaging I source from the original materials. I never use copies of magazines— I rip from the magazine and only use what I have. When I’m collaging, there's so much that gets lost in the middle because sometimes I rip things apart, and sometimes they just look ugly, and I have to discard them or use them later. And with poetry, I could erase the whole thing and start over. Whatever word I choose next is completely mine. If I don't like a word—I'll use a synonym. It's really difficult to find a photographic synonym when I'm looking through magazines so I work with what I have. It’s the difference between found material and creation that’s absolutely new.

MT– Speaking of your creative process, I think there’s a certain level of serendipity present in both poetry and collaging.

JT: Absolutely, I think serendipity might be the perfect word to describe how I feel about collaging and poetry. I think for both of them there is a stroke of fate. That happens before I start anything. I need to be inspired, I need to be interested, and once it hits, I have to do it.

MT— I want to shift gears a little bit. A lot of your collages evoke a feeling of nostalgia, but not necessarily directed towards something of the past. What is it that you find compelling about the past? What about the present?

JT— In Portuguese, we have this word called saudade. It means a nostalgic longing for something. And the interesting thing about saudade is that you can miss something which is there. It's about missing what’s passed. It's about missing what’s gone, but it's also about a love so strong that it almost breaks your heart. That's how I feel about both the past and the present. I have a love for beauty and I have a love for the moment and I want to crystallize them so bad that I know that it's so impossible and ephemeral that it hurts.

*I thought they’d bury our bodies together*

MT— The present is also the past, and this idea comes through your work in the way that you blend the two in compositional space.

JT— It is much more heartbreaking to love what is there so much that you want to keep it and know that it's going as you stare. The past and present to me are similar in that way. The feeling of saudade and the feeling of longing never stops. I guess nostalgic is the right word, but I am nostalgic for the present. I am nostalgic for what is here.

MT- Something else that struck me about your collages is that you either totally remove or blur out the eyes of human figures. What’s your relationship with the gaze?

The eyes are the windows to the soul as the saying goes, but the eyes are also the most recognizable part of any face. When I take them out, I make the people anonymous and I make them into whoever you want them to be. In Go Ask Alice, for example, the central figure looks like what I imagined an older Alice from Alice in Wonderland looks like with the blonde hair and features, but keeping her eyes would make her a woman playing Alice and not Alice herself. If I keep faces, they need to mean something. And if I take them out then I'm making them into something new. Looking is power, imagining is power, staring is powerful, and it scares me. It scares me to be vulnerable. It scares me to put my work out there, but I just let it happen.

MT – In many of your works such as Self-titled and I Thought They’d Bury Our Bodies you include elements about yourself. Could you tell me what self-portraiture through college feels like?

JT– When I was in Paris over the summer, I collected a lot of things. I collected museum brochures, ticket stops, and I collected pictures of myself because in Paris it’s very easy to get a photo booth picture of yourself taken. I knew that I wanted to make a self-portrait from the minute I took those pictures. I wouldn't say that I struggle with self-portraiture—I like it so much that it scares me. I tend to be very open and honest—heartbreakingly so. Self-portraiture was the last twist of a knife of vulnerability—of burying myself face first, but The Next Life and I Thought They’d Bury Our Bodies Together are the closest I've ever come to self-portraiture. Self-titled has pictures of me, and it also has lines about being a Sagittarius. There's also Audrey Hepburn in it… I've been told that I look like Audrey Hepburn, though I don't see the resemblance. I guess I’m just a brunette with big eyes.

There is a difference between using other people's faces in my work and my own. If I can't speak for them, because there are characters in my work, and I would rather keep their anonymity..

MT– When you put your work out there, what would you like your viewers to be looking for?

JT– The details. I am a detail oriented person. I love the big picture, don’t get me wrong— that's why I make art. I want people to look for the details and point them out when I myself don't care about details. I want someone to look for the details so intently that they realize that I did not look for the detail—that I didn't care about it. But I want people to imagine something new every time we see my work — I want them to look it over and have their own concept of it.

MT— Our conversation keeps circling back to this concept of beauty as being central to how your art interacts with the world, and as this everchanging force subject to time, space, identity, that is deeply personal. What is beauty for you?

I say beauty when most people would say the sublime— this ephemeral, ethereal, ungraspable wonder that is impossible to describe, is what I call beautiful. It's anything that stops me dead in my tracks and makes me think about it for days and days on end. For example, Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How it Ends is a book I have not finished but I can’t stop thinking about the words Tell Me How It Ends. I can't stop thinking about it— I think that's beautiful. A well organized photoshoot, a beautiful painting, an evocative thing. I think that beauty is anything that evokes a strong feeling in me, which can be delight or shock, or with “Tell Me How it Ends” this profound nostalgia.

Your instagram tag is @magpiecollages— that is a beautiful name. Is there a story behind it?

I had a very lovely person in my life call me “Magpie”. Magpies are corvids so they are from the same family as crows, and they are known for their high intelligence. Folktales say that they love shiny things, which is not exactly true: they love new things, but they are also scared of the new. They're also smart animals and lovers of beauty. They also can replicate human voices perfectly, and I guess there's a bit of me that feels I'm replicating humans. When I make art, I feel like a made up person. I guess everyone feels that way a little bit like they're making things up on the spot. Magpie collages exist because if I were an animal, I'd be a magpie. There's an episode of Madeline (a french show for children) where crows steal things from the children in the episode, and all of them start to fight because they think that they're losing things or that someone else stole it, but it's the birds, it's the birds the whole time. At the end of the episode, Madeline looks at the bird's nest, and finds clothes, socks, and hair pins, and all these beautiful things that crows took and created something new with, which is what I do. Magpies are just beautiful birds, and they're so smart. I'm a bird person, clearly.

I love birds— I think they’re beautiful.

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