Pranavi Khaitan

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

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. 

Eels Just Wanna Have Fun

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?”.  

Bing Bong

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

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

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

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.

Hands

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.

Bark

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.

North Star Aimar

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. 

Wild Anticipation

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.

The Greatest Foxhunt

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!

Untitled Abstract

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. 

A Morning When I Felt Beautiful

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.

Riley II

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.

Bedroom Choir

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. 

Unnamed

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

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? 

Maybe the next life

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. 

Ghosting

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. 

Here is looking at them

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.

Go Ask Alice

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.. 

self-titled

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.

Richard Lee

Feature by Claire Killian

Photo by Haley Cao

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alison Siegel

Feature by Iker Veiga

Photos by Adela Schwartz

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

Can you tell us about your first memories making art?

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

How does that playfulness translate into your craft? 

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

MINE, 2022

What does your art tell us about your personal story?

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

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

Whisper of a Leaf

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

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

Boundaries/containment

Selfportrait

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

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

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

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

Marshall

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

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

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

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

Cambria

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

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

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

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

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

Metropolitan Garden

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

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

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

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

Urban Recreational Design

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

You can follow my Instagram page, @alison_siegel!

Chandler Jong

Feature by Nora Cazenave

Photos by Caroline Cavalier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penny Shapiro

Feature by Sahai John

Photos by Orla Meehan

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

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

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

Untitled #18

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

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

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

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

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

Rendered Skirt

THE PANTS and MADELEINE

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

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

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

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

New Sketchbook Work #1

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

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

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

Skeleton to the Spiral Tower

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

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

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

The Puzzle Piece

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

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

Light Painting #7

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

What connection does dance have with your artwork? 

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

THE TIME CAPSULE OF MY MIND Film and Clip of Performance

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

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

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

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

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

2022 Self-Portrait

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

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

Gather From Everywhere Part 2

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

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

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

Untitled #19

Release

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

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

Where can we find your work?

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

Macy Sinreich

Feature by Cathleen Luo

Photos by Kendall Bartel

Production Assistants: Eva Abrego, Sungyoon Lim, Cas Sommer

BTS Video: Mackenzie Turner

Macy Sinreich is a sophomore transfer at Columbia College, studying Visual Arts. She explores ways to continuously experiment with multimedia in her art and uses surrealist imagery to express her inner world. 

I meet with Macy on a busy Wednesday, mid-week, mid-semester, on one of the first chilly days of fall. We sit at one of the ramp tables of Lerner, watching students scurry in and out of the building, running to classes and chatting with friends. As our conversation explores her experience transferring from Pratt and themes of independence and loneliness in her art, we observe the constant state of transition around us—which college has been for Macy and the rest of us. 

Macy’s work is youthful and yearning, dreamy in a way that understands what it’s like to be trapped in one’s head. As a multimedia artist dabbling in acrylics, graphite, and watercolor, she draws inspiration from personal experiences, specifically about growing comfortable with her own loneliness and solitude. Coming out of the pandemic as a high schooler, Macy’s art directly speaks to her experience during isolation. 

Cloud Fellows

She explains that her two pieces in the series “Sky Fellows” mark the beginning and end of her senior year. The first of the series depicts three giantesses among the clouds, occupying a contemplative space. Macy describes the fuel for its creation as “just feeling kind of lost” at the beginning of her last year of high school. She found solace in painting these purple figures in the sky, away from the stressors of reality. In the second piece of the series, made at the end of the school year, Macy says: “I wanted to cap off the year in a more uplifting place but still talked to the Sky theme, so I chose sunset as opposed to a cloudy sky.” These surrealist pieces reflect the meditative and spacey mindset of the artist at the time. These pieces can both be considered literal self-portraits, as the figures are based on Macy’s own physical image, they are also self portraits of her inner world at the time, telling us more than what’s on the surface.

Sky Fellows 2

When asked about self-portraiture, Macy finds that much of her work ends up unintentionally being both a symbolic and literal self-portrait. Young painters, like Macy, often don’t have easy access to models so they rely on photos taken of themselves to create references for poses. This occurs in “Sky Fellows” as well as her other pieces “Self Reflection” and “Who What Where When Why?” 

Who What Where When Why?

In “Self Reflection,” she plays with traditional still life drawing by placing herself within the work, her face seen through the reflections between the glass cups and pitchers. “Who What Where When Why?” is another direct self-portrait, this time playing with the idea of social media. The painting looks as if it could’ve been found while scrolling through Instagram; the blue arrows are fun, quirky edits on a casual selfie. With the self-portrait donning iconic flame-shaped sunglasses, a sense of 20-something youth and moody self-reflection comes through.

Self Reflection

This sort of ultra-contemporality struck me when I first saw Macy’s work. When asked about her intentions with this youthful energy, she responds, thoughtfully: “I never realized that I might be perceived as youthful. But I guess that makes sense since I am a young person painting the things that I see in my life.” In her other pieces, there are chocolates, lighters, Dr. Martens, lipstick, and Nike sneakers. The clothing items and accessories which so frequently show up in her paintings exemplify Macy’s love of fashion. She says, “Through these items from my everyday, I can symbolically represent feelings or periods in my life.” 

Nike

Chocolate

Some of her other pieces are more surrealist and absurd. Macy explains that “[Surrealism is] a good way to represent vulnerable feelings without making it so explicit. I don't necessarily want to make art that's directly telling you I am sad. I want to make art that's nuanced, subtle, and open to interpretation. And maybe that also has something to do with me not wanting to talk about things directly.” This surrealist absurdity can be seen in her pieces “Joy Ride,” “Time,” and “Wealth,” which have seemingly random items scattered around in the painting, like turkey dinners, cars, and geodes, as well as moments of architecture referencing classic Surrealist painters like Giorgio de Chirico. 

Wealth

Joy Ride

Macy’s favorite piece so far is “My Year as a Transplant,” a very personal mapping of her experiences as a freshman at Pratt. She describes the piece as a sort of memorial to her first year at college in watercolor and ink mixed media. The piece reflects the feeling of having a dream— the inability to connect all the fragments of narratives and scenes that are constantly shifting and just out of reach. In the piece, she draws borders around dream scenes of her everyday college life, and then breaks through the borders she created. She includes little city iconography at the bottom, rats and metrocards, a homage to her experience adjusting to New York.

My Year As A Transplant

Macy and I dissect each section of the piece together. The top right fragment replicates the feeling of being overwhelmed with “falling into a black hole.” The Dr. Marten boots in the puddle are shoes that fit into Macy’s fashion taste, and one scene shows her stepping into a puddle and causing rings to ripple out, along with the word “Home?” She explains that she added this word because: “I started calling New York ‘home’ when I went home to visit Ohio for Thanksgiving with my parents.” This questioning of where she actually belonged and felt comfortable became a big focus of her work in her first year. Other fragments include commentary on feeling overwhelmed by academics, symbolized by the computer, her decorated wall in college, and a scene of her laying in bed and spacing out. The recurring spiral motifs reflect the feeling of spinning in circles without direction. 

Time

Macy’s art reflects a place of transition that many of us can understand: the distraction, turbulence, restlessness, but also joy of figuring out college. As a transfer student, Macy is now majoring in visual arts and taking her first drawing class at Columbia. In class, she hopes to take “little bits and pieces of things from museums or libraries and daily life to make art with.” She says: “I'm a lot happier here, but it feels very much like I have a lot of momentum. And I just can't slow down. I think I'm finally breaking into a more conceptual space and loosening up and stylistically expanding.”

You can find Macy’s work on her website and instagram:

website: https://sites.google.com/view/macysinreich/fine-art

instagram: @maybe.macy.s

Lauren Lee

Feature by Julia Tolda

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

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

JULIA TOLDA: Why did you start photographing?

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

Le Bain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JT: What are some of your inspirations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disco Boots

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

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

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

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

Find out more about her @laurenpohlee

Adela Schwartz

Feature by Sophia Ricaurte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I WILL BE

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

WILL I EVER BE?

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

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

RIPPED APART

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

Lolo Dederer

Feature by Phoebe Sarah Dittmore Klebahn

Photos by Norman Godinez

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

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

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

iwish

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

reliquary to an empty mind

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

mon seul desire

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

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

egotisticalmaniac

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

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

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

disturbingmemagenta

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

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

Ashley Jiao

Feature by Claire Killian

Photos by Frances Cohen, Will Park

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

Who inspired you or encouraged you to pursue art? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you describe what your creative process is like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you first get involved in art? 

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

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

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

What is the most challenging thing about making art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s next for you and your art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art for me is just so sacred and unexplainable. 

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

Joan Tate

Feature by Anna Lugard

Photos by Maria Shaughnessy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dykin’ it 

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

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

Two Grief Portraits 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and can only call back
After Goya and Kahlo

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

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

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

Psychopomp (2021) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tetrapharmakos 

After Arthur Russell

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

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

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

that which is terrible
is easy to endure

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

Femmin’ It 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RGB Prosthetic: Session 3

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

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

Kate Miller

Feature by William Lyman

Photos by Rommel Nunez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find Kate @kkatemiller on Instagram.

Taylor Bluestine

Feature by Sophie Paquette

Photos by Jane Mok

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

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

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

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

Sophie:

Do you ever record any kind of process documentation?

Taylor:

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

Sophie:

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

Taylor:

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

Sophie:

Where else can we find your work?

Taylor:

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

Shiloh Tracey

Feature by Sophia Ricaurte

Photos by Dennis Franklin

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

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

How do you like New York? 

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

How would you describe your background? 

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

My Mother’s Child

Who are your influences? 

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

Do home and religion converge for you?

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

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

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

Earth Church (Pacifist’s Polemic Against the Lawn)

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

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

Lovers in Blue

What’s your relationship with feminism?

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

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

How Do You Know What Your Body Is

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

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

BOY* Black Transmasc Reflections

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

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

Wow. What do your creative processes look like? 

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

What are your current obsessions? 

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

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

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

Gut Wheels

What does healing feel like to you?

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

Where do you see yourself in the future?

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

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

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

Lilly Cao

Feature by Elena Sperry-Fromm

Photos by Grace Li

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

What does your process look like? 

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

Self Portrait (Pathological)

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

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

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

Rhizome Set Drawings

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

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

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

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

Close

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

What is that relationship like between interiority and abstraction?

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

Self Portrait (Archaeological)

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

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

Skin I

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

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