Warren McCombs

April 29, 2023

Feature by Stuart Beal

Photos by Adela Schwartz

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

We approach Schermerhorn and it’s raining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McCombs has a much stronger hold than most.

Cat Luo

April 29, 2023

Feature by Korrin Lee

Photos by August Cao

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Reshetnikov

April 29, 2023

Feature by Sahai John

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

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

When did you first start creating art?

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

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

Where do you draw the majority of your inspiration from?

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

How does living in New York City influence your work?

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

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

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

How has Columbia influenced your art career?

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

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

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

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

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

What artists inspire you and influence your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what ways do you portray trauma in your art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where can we find more of your work?

My Instagram @vilinda.a and my website!

Danielle Sung

April 29, 2023

Feature by Sayuri Govender

Photos by Will Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What message do you wish to convey with your art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathryn Whitten

April 28, 2023

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Anais Mitelberg

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

Tell me a little about your relationship with art.

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

Why do you make art?

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

How did you venture into different kinds of mediums?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are some of those practical challenges?

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

Then, do you exclusively work from reference?

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

Have you ever tried to make abstract pieces?

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

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

What are your favorite pieces in your catalog?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luca Benzimra

April 26, 2023

Feature by Brontë Grimmer

Photos by Jade Li and Caroline Cavalier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there anything else you want to share?

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

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

My Instagram, my handle is @lucabenzimra.

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

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

Grace Li

April 20, 2023

Feature by Yam Pothikamjorn

Photos by Will Park

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

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

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

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

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

You can find Grace’s work at:

@gracestills on Instagram

https://www.gracestills.com

Sophie Johnson

April 12, 2023

Feature by Julia Tolda

Photos by Frances Cohen

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

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

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

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

SJ: Sure, if you wouldn't mind.

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

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

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

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

JT: Where are you from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JT: What motifs are ubiquitous in your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JT: Where do you draw your inspiration from?

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

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

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

JT: What about body horror draws you in?

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

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

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

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

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

JT: Do you see art as a challenge?

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

Forest Wong

April 11, 2023

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Emily Lord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SC: Was this piece specific to certain family customs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

SC: How have you changed your approach to art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SC: How have you coped with that?

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

SC: How do you see yourself continuing your work?

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

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

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

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

Pranavi Khaitan

March 28, 2023

Feature by Mara Toma
Photos by Wynona Barua

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

Mara Toma – What got you into photography?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watson Frank

March 10, 2023

Feature by Sadie Hornung-Scherr

Photos by Kendall Bartel

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

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

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

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

To The Worm That First Gnawed At My Corpse

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

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

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

Max Patel

March 10, 2023

Feature by Claire Killian

Photos by Grace Li

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cadence Gonzales

March 10, 2023

Feature by Raunak Lally

Photos by Anais Mitelberg

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

Go ahead and introduce yourself!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disorganized!

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

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

Carlos Sánchez-Tatá

March 4, 2023

Feature by Iker Veiga

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

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

Can you talk about your first memories making art?

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

Did you heal through art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where can the Ratrock readers find you and your art?

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

Julia Tolda

January 31, 2023

Feature by Mara Toma

Photos by Jane Mok

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

Mara Toma – What got you into collaging?

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

MT—Why collage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*I thought they’d bury our bodies together*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love birds— I think they’re beautiful.

Richard Lee

January 31, 2023

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

January 30, 2023

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

January 24, 2023

Feature by Nora Cazenave

Photos by Caroline Cavalier

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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

December 9, 2022

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

November 28, 2022

Feature by Cathleen Luo

Photos by Kendall Bartel

Production Assistants: Eva Abrego, Sungyoon Lim, Cas Sommer

BTS Video: Mackenzie Turner

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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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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