Sofía Trujillo

November 17, 2023

Feature by Claire Killian

Photos by Anushka Khetawat

She may not have realized it, but in her black turtleneck and leather jacket, Sofía Trujillo looked every bit like the writer I had imagined. With my hair pragmatically pulled back and my notebook and pen in hand, I probably looked exactly like the interviewer I was playing at, too. I had suggested we meet in Butler to chat, which she countered with the Hungarian Pastry Shop – an infinitely better choice given the shop’s ambiance, and its deep roots of literary history. We both waved to friendly faces (a few we had in common!) as we shuffled awkwardly past the tight tables, to the back, and sat down. I was waiting for my first almond horn of the season, and she had a hot chocolate coming.

Sofía, a Barnard junior, has a command over language and a way of painting with words that feels all-consuming (and frankly, extremely intimidating. I mean, how am I supposed to write an article about a writer?). Reading Sofia’s work is a sensory experience. She writes with an abundance of scenery and description, both abstract and tangible, that does more than just help you visualize the narrative, but allows you to actually live within it. On explaining my experience reading her work, Sofía seemed a bit surprised, explaining that she just “get[s] really heavy handed.” Sofía elaborated that some of her influences include “David Foster Wallace and some Virginia Woolf, but especially the latter: I think most Virginia Woolf came after being told, ‘oh, I feel like you write like this.’ I already had established my voice, and realized ‘I also have really long sentences with a lot of adjectives’ so in school my parents, my teachers, would repeatedly make comments on my papers. One of my teachers called my sentences baroque.” As an art history student, I jumped at that – baroque is, in the best way possible, exactly how I would describe Sofía’s writing, full of simmering tension and tenebrism. Sofía continued, “there's so much to say about every given thing and I want to put everything in a sentence - and give it a color and a sound and a name and what it is about. That is what is exciting about writing to me.”

Undergirding this pathos, and giving Sofía’s writing its potency, is her commitment to writing what she sees and lives. Practically everything she writes is grounded in her own experiences, which she filters through absurdist and satirical lenses, though she cautions that, “I use those words more as adjectives than as a movement,” clarifying that she does not see herself as a Satirist or Absurdist (as proper nouns) but rather someone who plays with elements of those movements. Explaining her relationship with satire, for Sofía, satire is “a way to give an opinion, but also hide behind humor and nonchalance, to say ‘I don't care.’ Which is not always true, you can act like you don't care. You're just making a joke.” Sofía arguably began to develop her affinity for social critique in freshman year. As an international student coming from Argentina, her experience was different from many U.S. natives: “People thought I was cool on the basis of nothing. I remember feeling like I wasn't even required to have a personality because just my experience growing up somewhere else was enough material. I say ‘I've never been to Chick-fil-A’ and people would freak out.”

Sofia describes herself as being predisposed to holding back her thoughts, never the first to share an opinion nor someone who moves through the world with externalized convictions, something that people have occasionally misinterpreted: “my own hesitancy to say things about social dynamics and silence was interpreted as, ‘okay, it's cool.’ People just fill in the gaps in their brain. I think it was me doing a ground-analysis of the situation. It was also just a lot of fear, and a lot of discomfort. I was really scared to take a stance in general, and I was raised in an environment that sometimes encouraged me to be more fearful of what was new instead of curious. Taking a stance, for me, on anything, literally the smallest thing, felt like losing my ability to maneuver 360° all the time. I was staking my claim with this one particular corner of a discussion, and I didn't like that because I didn't feel like I had enough knowledge to stand behind it. It got to a point where I wanted people to know what I stand for more clearly.” Sofía did not come to writing as a form of self-expression linearly, her path was not as romantic as just “she wrote her way out of it.” It took a mix of therapy and practice - all of which diffuses into her writing to create works so thoroughly observant of the human experience. Reading her work feels like becoming another person altogether, you become so immersed in her world. Sofía’s style reads like the perfect blend between a surgeon and a surrealist - something so profoundly emotive but also deeply precise in its details.

Having heard so much about her writer’s process, I felt compelled to ask Sofía how she contends with questions about originality in her work – some artists seem obsessed with it, while others swat it off as ego-driven and impossible. After thinking for a moment, she replied, “I do think that that's something that every person who is creating something is going to grapple with. Because so much of my work is centered on my human experience, I truly focus on the exceptionality of each person and what they do. That's why I'm not necessarily as concerned with doing something that really makes me feel powerful, and that's hard.” Despite her focus on her own lived experiences, Sofía often writes as a disembodied third-person narrator, finding it to be just as personal but far more rewarding. “I'm tired of myself,” she said with a slight, exasperated roll of her eyes. “That's how I was feeling in my whole non-fiction class this semester. I had already, previously, taken another class called ‘What's Your Story.’ So, I had already been writing about myself for so long. I'd already written about my mother; our issues are well parsed out. Every time I would start a sentence with ‘I,’ I felt disgusted. That's kind of when I started writing about all these other things, because it felt like a way to talk about how I see things but not really center myself.” Out of all the brilliant things Sofía said to me at the café that day, this struck me the most. Here is a person who so sincerely experiences the world around her in prose, then uses the skills that she has worked so hard to develop to reflect the world back at itself. It is difficult to properly convey the power of the earnestness present in Sofia’s writing. (although, I suspect, Sofía could probably do it, and do it well). It is both natural and honed, as well as more deeply experiential than could ever be replicated.

On leaving Hungarian, Sofía explained, “when I got here, I never thought that I would have enough work to send it somewhere.” I looked at her, puzzled, and she explained, “I never thought that I would be chosen for someone to ask me questions about what I thought about writing, or that I would have answers.” I told her that I would call it a full-circle moment, for her to go from imagining interviews to participating in them—but for Sofía it is not, nor has it ever been, a circle, but rather a zig-zag of meaningful experiences and serendipitous accidents. Keep your eyes open for her work around campus – though be aware that if you bump into her, you might find yourself in the background of one of her pieces.

Read her work here.

Ava Frisina

November 16, 2023

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

Ava, a Senior at Columbia College majoring in architecture, brings a touch of nostalgia to her creative endeavors. Hailing from Los Angeles, Ava channels her artistic pursuits through the mediums of scrapbooking and sculpture, as well as experimenting and reimagining various uses of materials. Ava has a knack for creating pieces that strike a fine balance between profound familiarity and intimacy, all while maintaining a strong sense of design and a high level of craftsmanship. During our conversation, Ava told me about her relationship with art and design, her plans for the future, as well as her creative process and the foundational principles that guide her projects.

I was 10 minutes late to Ava’s room in one of the Special Interest Community (SIC) buildings. She arrived downstairs, saying goodbye to a friend she was with before greeting me excitedly. Her friend jokingly said “Agh, thanks Ava for letting me interview you for my magazine”, to which I nervously giggled and they comfortably laughed. We introduced ourselves, said bye to her friend, and went up to the fifth floor. On the elevator ride up, Ava and I immediately began to talk about a range of topics starting with the fact that her SIC is the first visual artist community on campus, and that this was its inaugural year. As we approached her room, our conversation flowed effortlessly, casually getting to know each other while reacting giddily when we had something in common, such as our interest in architecture, both being middle children, and our shared love for her room’s delightful feature – the window that floods her space, adorned with her bike and various knickknacks, in natural sunlight. Our conversation began to flow over to her history and relationship with architecture. At this point, I had to interrupt our conversation to start recording on my phone, almost forgetting the reason that I was there, for this interview.

Ava started telling me about her journey with architecture and her college experience. Initially, she wasn’t sure about what she wanted to do. Once she realized all the classes she thought were cool were related to architecture, she realized that was what she wanted to focus on. Her origins as an artist and architect are muddled yet incredibly distinct. Having grown up in Los Angeles, Ava was exposed to a world of creativity, with her parents instilling in her an interest in creativity and design. Her mother, for one, was involved in the costume design industry and crafts jewelry. Moreover, Ava’s mom possesses the unique ability to create very intentional and aesthetically pleasing spaces, instilling in Ava an eye for finding value in found objects. She fondly recounted her childhood memories of trailing behind her mom as a kid:

“As a little kid, I would follow her around and pick up little scraps along the way. She's a very fast walker, so when I say follow her around, I literally mean trailing behind her. We really liked thrift stores and bead shops- the wholesale bead shop in downtown LA. I remember all the people who worked there and would give me little baggies of beads and other materials that they didn't really need anymore. They were all these weird things that should have been thrown out like dead bugs, or broken plastic from a hanger. I would take those and add them to my collection of things.”

While Ava told me stories from her childhood, I imagined a messy-haired blonde girl running behind her mom. A younger Ava, her attention easily swayed by objects that caught her eye, didn’t mind that her curiosity often meant that her mom would quickly walk away. This attention to detail and, more specifically, appreciation of things that are seemingly meaningless, is what Ava learned from her mother. It wasn’t just her mom, however, who shaped Ava’s creative journey. Her dad also had a huge effect on Ava as an artist and creative. Sharing a room her whole life, for a while with her younger brother, Ava decided to take matters into her own hands At the age of 10, Ava built a loft in her room, completely transforming the space she was forced, grudgingly, to share. She saw, for the first time, how design can alter spaces, and how she can play around with the environments around her. During her story, I began to wonder how physically she built a loft, being that she was only 10 years old. That’s where her father comes into the picture. Ava, with her natural inclination towards sketching, collaborated with her dad, and they built the loft together.

Ava mentioned The Pocket Universal Principles of Design, a source of inspiration that deepened her understanding of space and its profound effects on the human experience. To me, she seemed like someone who actively engages with the media she consumes, thinking about everything she reads, watches, and listens to, in a way that makes sense for herself. It was really refreshing to hear. This innate curiosity and the stimulation she finds in theory and literature serve as a source of inspiration, motivating her to apply what she learns independently to her designs..

This relation between reading and art caught my attention, so I asked Ava about other books that have been significant for her.

“This is a little book, very serendipitous. My friends visited me in Copenhagen last semester, and they brought me this book they picked on impulse because the cover reminded them of me. I read it and found that everything about it struck a chord with me. The author, Legacy Russel, coined the term Glitch Feminism, and it refers to people who disidentify from the social norms, where you’re queer, a woman, a person of color, neurodivergent, all of these categories fall into a glitch. She turns a glitch, a negative thing in the coding world, into a space you can rip open and build a world within that space. The language she used was so spatial, and I was really drawn to that, so I took what she said quite literally and decided to try to apply it to architecture and design. I try to collect things that are discarded, that are glitches, like furniture or old tires, and put it to use and give it meaning. Most of what I do is trying to make a world in glitch design, especially for women and queer people.

Ava told me about her perspective as a queer person in the world of design and architecture, as well as highlighting the lack of representation or the mere acknowledgement of the existence of queer people within the field. With her awareness of the diversity in architectural practices around the world, Ava found it intriguing that despite the omnipresence of queer people, their presence remained largely invisible and understood as a minority.

“It’s interesting that there hasn't been a queer architecture that's been established yet. So tying it into this idea of archive, I think it's really interesting to build a critical mass of glitch artifacts to see if there's some underlying theme. I want to see what it looks like to have queer designs and glitch designs in one place,” said Ava.

This really resonated with me. We delved further into our shared opinions on design and architecture as areas that are meticulously planned yet often thoughtlessly overlook diverse identities. Ava pointed out the stark insensitivity in fields such as car design, and how its practices do not take into account diversity of body types or female anatomy. Ava is truly passionate about how design, space, experience, and identity can be understood together – which I really enjoyed thinking about – so I asked her to tell me more about how her identity finds expression in her work. She patiently showed me many of her pieces that lie around her room. From remnants of past assignments she had a special liking for, to plans and plywood of the chair she designed during her study abroad in Copenhagen, her scrapbooks, a pair of black heels she transformed by gluing hair to them, to a stoplight sculpture she created by tufting thread through a metal grid, and even a surrealist tire rim with air-dried clay filling the holes, each project embodied her identity as an artist and designer. Her pieces, in my eyes, exemplify the essence of glitch design that captivates her artistic process – an amalgamation of chaos and freedom that defies conventional norms of art and design.

While I was looking at all her pieces, I asked Ava about how she makes art for herself versus making art for others, especially considering the intimate nature of scrapbooking. I was curious about the complexities artists face when sharing such vulnerabilities. Ava shared how she did not think of herself as an artist in the past. As a result, everything she created was inherently personal, she would be perfectly content with it being private, with each piece emerging spontaneously, driven by raw emotion. She told me how she sees art as a repository of feelings and memories. For Ava, scrapbooking, and transforming her emotions into tangible pieces of art, imbues her feelings with significance and validates their existence in the physical world. In a way, scrapbooking is Ava’s way of attributing value to her emotions, and acknowledging their reality.

Ava began her design-focused Instagram account with the intention of creating a community around art and design. She is skeptical, however, about social media and digital archives, but has come to appreciate their value. Ava has found immense worth in using her new Instagram account to establish a centralized archive for her work. In her exploration of creating art for others, Ava has found it fascinating to see how people react and engage with her pieces. She enthusiastically described how engaging with her audience has been a huge source of genuine enjoyment. Ava gets to see her art from a new perspective, and can now concretely observe the impact it has on individuals by getting active input in her pieces, a dynamic exchange which Ava approaches with an open, curious, and nonjudgmental attitude.

As graduation approaches for Ava, her life is open to taking many different paths. Ava shared her plans, which include the possibility of graduate school abroad. She emphasized, however, the profound enrichment that she has derived from her time in New York, where she has had the ability of experiencing the vibrant art and design community. She contemplates the idea of staying in the city, but is also yearning to travel, a feeling she conceptualizes as a “travel bug”. Ava’s guiding principles appear to be the ongoing quest for spaces in which her creativity can flourish, which allows her to navigate her future with relative ease and can happen anywhere, so she doesn’t worry too much about where she will end up.

Eleanor Furness

November 15, 2023

Feature by Eve Rosenblum

Photos by Lauren Zhou

It was a perfect autumn evening, one of those nights where you forget all your worries in the crispness of the air and the yellow-orange of the leaves. On the patio of Hungarian, as I waited for Eleanor, I caught the eye of a little girl glaring at me and my chocolate cake. “It’s not fair Mama.” She said, “Why hasn’t our food come yet?” The Mom laughed her daughter off, explaining, you have to wait your turn. As I did my best not to start my cake before the girl’s arrived, I kept thinking about her skepticism. I had forgotten there was a world where I too, once, had not understood these rules.

20 minutes later Eleanor arrived, distinguishing herself from the chichi crowd of the Upper West with cropped bangs and black joggers. A senior, majoring in cognitive science, she transferred two years ago from Scripps College in Southern California, having started to go crazy from the lack of seasons and fog.

Fog, I learned, is big for Eleanor. She grew up admiring these misty weather systems roll through her family’s home in Northern California. A love of nature was also inculcated through the “weird progressive” lower school she went to. The day was largely spent playing outside, in Eleanor’s case, digging in the dirt.

She explained how it shaped her personal philosophy or lack thereof. For Eleanor, there was no need to question why we do things.

“When you’re just playing in the dirt all day, or building stuff with your hands or playing games or planting lettuce the meaning becomes so self evident. It's not even a question.”

Our disconnect from nature also blinds us from our position in a larger framework of relations, she explained. A more accurate and whole world view would involve non-human entities as well. “There's just so much we can learn from animals or even just properties of objects too, and their relationship to each other, in our relationship to them.”

She points to the table we’re sitting at. “This table is a table. It's useful because we can put things on it, but what else is going on with the table? What's this table’s specific history? What has it been through? What kind of psychic energy does it have? If we flip it around, could it be used as a weird pillow?” The more she learns about the brain in her readings, the more she thinks structuralism could be right. “It's not about the discrete items, but their relation to each other.”

But a structuralist understanding of the world has only drifted further from the modern consciousness, Eleanor argues. She cites the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In his conception, under neoliberal capitalism comes a “pornographication” or flattening of existence. Everything is made accessible and visible. Mystery is sapped. Rituals disappear. This only serves to further isolate ourselves from others under the guise of individualism.

I asked Eleanor if she’s been able to protect herself from this experience. Away from her home she emphasized the impossibility. “I can't, and I'm sad. I experience a constant sense of alienation.” In New York she feels that the people, things, or animals around us are seen as valuable based on their usefulness to us. “It defeats the purpose of being alive. It's deeply dehumanizing and depressing” she said.

Children, however, intuitively connect to the world. Her mother used to tell her how while examining her Barbie doll, she discovered eyebrows. To rediscover this curiosity, adults need boredom. “Even now when I'm inconvenienced, obviously, my immediate reaction is annoyance, but then I usually feel grateful, because no, I don't want to be just completing one thing after the other, as quickly as humanly possible. The inconvenience kind of is the point.”

Art can be a practice of inconvenience. Alternating between photography and drawing, Eleanor’s work explores childhood through the younger person as either its subject or its view point. A pencil drawing shows a girl, tears streaming down her cheeks. Loosely sketched toys peak out from beside the toddler: a robot shrouded in darkness on the one side, a hanging bunny on the other. A similar girl appears in a photograph, with a worn out blanket held just before her face. Her mischievous smile and expressionless eyes captivates the viewer's gaze, recalling the confidence and shameless character of their younger self.

Other photographs depict visual curiosities. A hairless cat on an all-white background. An aquarium, with a string of sea moss reflecting at the surface of the tank, appearing to converge two opposite aquatic worlds for infinity. A colorful anemone, just visible beneath the shadow of the photographer, hair billowing behind them. A maze, three hands exploring its structure, and an older figure, leaning over them, pointing.

Looking at Eleanor’s work, I forget the focused vision I’ve learned in adulthood. As her photos delight in the curiosity of the younger person’s eye, her sketches demonstrate the different significance of childhood objects. A stuffed bunny might mean fear or comfort to a child, but rarely anything more than a price to an adult. Eleanor’s work provokes the possibility that a return, at least in feeling, is possible.

But Eleanor emphasizes her art is not for the greater good. On the contrary, art is a personal practice, a means of processing the world, that most of the time, she’s not aware of. “Like, oh my God, I have to do it. I just have to get to a point of being so uncomfortable with myself and pissed off that I just cave and make something.” The art-making itself is rarely fun. In fact, it’s usually a low. “In my opinion, you're gonna feel a little shaky, a little sweaty, a little depleted after, but satisfied. It’s like a good barf.”

Creating for an assignment, however, the process can go from hard to torturous. “When you're kind of in that middle range of being an artist, there's a lot of feeling like you need to prove yourself, or you're trying to make a statement. Art becomes a kind of discourse, rather than something a little bit more ambiguous or secretive or particular.” This is wrong, she thinks. Art, for her, is not an act of producing but a way of life. If others enjoy her work she would celebrate it, but that doesn’t motivate her to create. “That's not the point,” she said. “And I don’t think it could be the point.”

I asked Eleanor what the point was. She had talked at length about her disgruntlement with the lack of connection in modern society, so the fact that she pursued a solitary practice, such as art, surprised me. Art has taught her how to be alone, she explained. Ironically, this opens you up to deeper and more meaningful connections. Put yourself out there, society suggests. “You might be able to make more friendships, but they're probably not going to be the ones you really want.”

Through solitude, she has learned how to be with others: truly trying to understand them. “It takes humility and an ability to admit that you may be wrong, but it’s only going to pay off and lead to a more genuine connection.”

This vulnerability Eleanor described reminded me of the girl at the Hungarian sitting next to me only an hour ago, unafraid to look me in the eyes. This vision of connection was possible for our younger selves who acted without hesitancy. Through her pieces, Eleanor turns back time, leaving the rest of us to consider how we will too.

Reach out to Eleanor at ellie.ryann.f@gmail.com.

Jamie Iacovitti

November 14, 2023

Feature by Nathan Ko

Photos by Adela Schwartz

Jamie Iacovitti is a junior at Columbia College majoring in English with a concentration in East Asian Language and Culture. Jamie’s particularly interested in photography and databending. He also sometimes indulges in writing short stories. His work challenges the audience to acknowledge the existence of different perceptions of the world—perceptions perhaps more radical and colorful than ours.

My first interaction with Jamie was over email. I got an enthusiastic email from him asking for a time to meet. He generously gave me a list of times that stretched from Monday to Sunday.

At that time, I was bombarded with work. I received a follow-up e-mail from Jamie which I tend to find quite scary. It’s not that they’re rude, but rather I just feel bad that I didn’t get to their e-mail on time. And I felt similarly in this situation. Jamie’s follow-up email, however, wasn’t scary at all. The smiley faces and soothing tone of his email reassured me that Jamie was the type of guy who I would love to talk to.

I first met Jamie in person on the first floor of Shapiro Hall before going to his dorm where we later conducted the interview. We quickly said hi, and I couldn’t help but notice that his loud t-shirt, stained with neon colors, felt reminiscent of his vibrant art. He had effortlessly messy hair that any artist in New York would envy. We head to his room, and I, again, find myself immersed in colors. His room had LED lights running through his walls as many Columbia students have. He also had his own art with its flashes of neon colors, which many Columbia students don’t have. This rush of colors and sensations is something that appears throughout his photos that use databending. Databending is the process of manually corrupting the metadata and code of digital pictures. The result is a sort of unsettling, neon photograph that feels both familiar yet foreign.

I mentioned this sort of rush, and he brought up his own sensory issues.

“I get overwhelmed very easily by certain things. Databending gives me a way to make an audience feel the way I feel, an onrush of sensations they may not feel on a daily basis.”

This feeling of rush is something that also stems from Jamie’s interest in horror. He mentions how one of his favorite games, Silent Hill, is a horror game, and talks about how the genre of horror carries over to his work.

“I think there might be a touch of cosmic primal horror in my work, but it's not explicitly expressed.”

When we think about horror, we often think of being spooked at a haunted house or looking at something really creepy. Yet, for Jamie, horror is more associated with the feeling of engulfment.

“It's more about primal nature, something that unnerves you without being outright scary. Overstimulation plays into that feeling, something you can experience in various aspects of life.”

Jamie’s interest in horror overall stemmed from the release of Coraline, a movie that spooked him as a young kid. He was scared to the point of always keeping the lights on. But, years later, he decided to confront his fear head-on by watching Coraline again, and this time, he was really intrigued by it. Specifically, when watching Coraline, he felt a primal feeling—a type of fear that can be felt deeply on an instinctual level.

It’s not just Coraline that inspired him as an artist. By watching a lot of movies as a kid, Jamie would see these beautiful shots and decide that he could replicate such beauty through photography. As a kid, he would use his Nintendo DSI as his camera. And, later on, he found a video of someone databending, and it reminded him of the y2k aesthetic that he was interested in. After being mesmerized by the process, he reached out to the content creator on how to databend. Surprisingly, the content creator responded to Jamie and gave him a rundown. Ever since that moment, Jamie has been databending.

For Jamie, databending is an interesting tool because it allows him to accomplish a lot of things: he’s able to challenge the audience’s own perceptions of the world by offering a new perception, a manipulated vision that’s eerie—unstable, almost.

“Everyone has a different perception of the world. The way I see the world is different than how you see the world. This carries over to databending when you’re able to make pictures that look completely different from their original form but still technically the same subject.”

This idea of destroying our own conceptions of the world is something quite overt in Jamie’s work. In Jamie’s piece “cuore,” which has the words “DESTROY THE WORLD” all in capital, he mentions how he aimed to destroy our own perceived ideas of the world through databending. Essentially, Jamie’s trying to show a radical reimagining of a photo of reality to prove the existence of different views of the world.

This idea was not something Jamie thought of overnight but rather came through watching anime. One of his main inspirations in art is the anime Serial Experiments Lain which comments on the instability of the way we view the world. That certainly carries over to his idea of destroying our own perceptions of reality. He’s also inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion. That anime, for Jamie, explored the idea of how others view us differently from how we view ourselves, which enticed him.

This repeating theme of the instability of our perceptions isn’t something only unique to Jamie’s visual artworks. Jamie’s an English major, and he often explores the theme of perception through creative writing.

“A lot of things I write are about perspective or about the internal flawed thinking. Most of the things I write about are people learning that what they're perceiving is just not accurate. A lot of things I write, like the perspectives and points of view, are all jumbled up and messed up, and you have to kind of figure out what’s happening. In the same way, when you look at a picture of mine, you’re asking yourself what the original subject may be.”

In that way, writing and photography have overlaps in Jamie’s interests. However, in creative processes, they’re quite different. While Jamie describes writing to be all his effort, he says that photography that involves databending is different.

In a way, databending is somewhat of a blind process. During the process of databending, Jamie’s unable to see what he’s really doing to the pictures. He’s just corrupting the metadata and code; hence, the visuals are determined by random chance. He mentions how this allows some sort of higher power to offer their finishing touches on his photos.

While Jamie’s not strictly religious, he mentions that his Catholic childhood makes him more of a spiritual person. He describes how that carries over to his art.

“In Catholicism, there's this feeling of God's presence all around. I think there's some truth to that, as there's an external force moving the universe. Databending allows that force to take over. You can't physically see the changes you make to the picture. It's like pressing random buttons and letting chaos or whatever force you believe in, interact with the photo. If the outcome is appealing, great. If not, you restart and let the universe work its magic. I'd say it's about 50% me and 50% the universe. I take the initial picture and then let the universe take the reins after pressing those random buttons.”

In the process of pressing those buttons to digitally manipulate his photos, Jamie’s actively exploring a contradiction. Jamie mentions how his work explores the chaos that emerges from the binary of the concrete and the digital—the photographs of the world he takes and the digital databending of them. He’s particularly interested in this binary even though it may seem contradictory at times.

“The universe works in contradiction, so having a more physical medium like photography and converting it digitally and making the digital part of it a big part of the process is just something I find very beautiful.”

Jamie’s emphasis on contradiction reminded me of the way John Keats described Shakespeare—the way in which he possessed “negative capability.” And by negative capability, Keats means the ability of an artist to explore contradictions and uncertainties without reaching a clear conclusion. It seemed like Jamie was not bugged by and perhaps rather comfortable with this murky, contradictory space. The contradictory space of taking his own photos of the world and having the universe manipulate them.

But, in a way, his comfortability with digitally manipulating his photos makes sense given his STEM background. Jamie used to be a student in the engineering school before he transferred to Columbia College and became an English major. Hence, he finds the digital process to be a comfortable medium to explore his art.

When Jamie brought this up, I was shocked, since there are very few students I know who transfer from one undergraduate college to another at Columbia, and the shift from STEM to English felt very abrupt for me. Jamie mentioned how he had a severe car accident in 2021 that shifted the way he viewed life. In a way, it was a memento mori incident, a moment that reminded him of the inevitability of death.

“I thought, ‘I'd rather die happy than be depressed.’ It shifted my perspective and made me realize I don't have to conform to a life that doesn't bring me joy. It allowed me to choose to live a happy life, and that was the most significant change to stem from the accident.”

Such an accident not only propelled him to study English but also fueled him to start making art.

“Perhaps a little while after the car accident, I felt the urge to pursue art further, something I always wanted to do but lacked the determination until then.”

As he quickly decided to do art, he started to make art without any training.

“It's all self-taught. I haven't received any formal art training, not even in writing. My writing 'training' was in English class.” He mentions that trial and error and learning through the love of the craft is what allowed him to produce art on a higher level.

During the interview, I remember being impressed by Jamie’s self-urgency to create art, especially without training. I noted how it must have taken a lot of self-confidence, and Jamie mentioned how he used to be an anxious kid without any self-esteem. He brought up how his friend Soph from Cincinnati, Ohio was someone who brought out his confidence, which allowed him to pursue art.

And with this confidence, Jamie’s able to perhaps explore more art forms as well. While Jamie doesn’t have any set plans for the future, he did tell me that he has a budding interest in pursuing music, which just like photography and writing, he’s willing to learn by himself.

“Art has visual, written, and musical aspects. Music seems like the third major one. Maybe I can call myself an artist within these realms.”

The process of being self-taught is something that impacted all his artistic processes. Hence, in a way, Jamie feels that making art for him almost depends on being self-taught.

Teaching myself makes the process of making art more personal. And I think because I was self-taught, I take the pictures that I take and write the stories that I write. It’s a very internal process of learning and the style of art that comes out of it becomes more personal.”

To find more of Jamie’s art, you can access his Instagram.

Hart Hallos

October 27, 2023

Feature by Phoebe Klebahn

Photos by Mori Liu, assisted by Grace Schleck and Emily Chmiel

Hart Hallos is a senior in Columbia College studying Visual Arts. Hart’s artistic practice centers around exploring themes such as queerness, humor, power, delusion, trashiness, filth, and the language of emails. When asked to describe their artistic practice, Hart compares their relationship with art to joyfully chasing a butterfly through a field… and then tripping in a hole and breaking their ankle.

When I arrived at Hart's home I was greeted warmly. They invited me to sit down at the table in the quaint tableau of an Italian restaurant that Hart and their roommate had constructed against one of their living room walls. Hart struck me immediately as warm, welcoming, witty and carefree, and I was fascinated by the spacious, artistic, and intentional feel of their standard Columbia studio double. On the walls of the living room is an eclectic display of Hart’s art, as well as trinkets, baubles, pieces of quilt, and one of Hart’s old halloween costumes.

After properly admiring the walls and decorations, we talked for almost an hour about Hart’s life, academic and artistic journey, and their plans as a soon-to-be graduate.

Hart recently returned from a semester off, and told me a bit about how their time away from Columbia has influenced their ideal post graduate life.

“I do not think that when I get out of school making art will pay my bills, and that is fine by me. I took a semester off—which is why I have this shifted schedule and will be graduating in December—and I just worked at an ice cream store and paid my bills. And then this summer I worked at a food truck and paid my bills that way. And that's the current plan—to go back and do that and try to make art on my own time. I definitely do not have an expectation that art will support me at this point in time.”

Hart was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky and they are absolutely thrilled to be moving back home this Spring.

“I feel like Kentucky is a way easier place for me to make stuff than New York is, which is something that took me a bit to realize. I find Lexington and the people I meet there very inspiring. The older artists in my life, who have somehow finagled their way into being supported financially by what they do, have told me to find the place first and then let the art follow from there.”

The presentation of queerness is an integral part of Hart’s artistic expression. Hart acknowledged that outsiders often perceive their love of their Southern hometown as being at odds with their queerness – but Hart doesn’t see it that way.

“So many of my social interactions freshman year were me, presenting as a very visible queer person, being like, ‘I'm from Kentucky.’ And people being like, ‘oh no!’ And for the first bit of college, I would be like, ‘Yeah, haha, it kind of sucks.’ But now I really try to be like, ‘Actually, Kentucky's awesome!’ I try to counter people's expectations, because people have that reaction a lot. But there are queer people in Kentucky. I promise. Everywhere! I'm interested in the lives of queer people in Kentucky. That is currently what a lot of my work is based around, so where better to do that than to be a queer person in Kentucky?”

The ceramic wall fountain Hart submitted as a part of their portfolio specifically speaks to these experiences. Last semester, many states, including Kentucky, explicitly banned gender affirming care for minors. Though the veto was overridden, this debate surrounding gender and gender affirming care caused Hart to examine and reflect on how gender and sexuality are publicly portrayed and commodified.

“I was just so viscerally upset by that and the idea of this place where all these really marginalized, vulnerable queer people exist being something that is able to be commodified and in such a direct way. I was just thinking about places that I'm familiar with, where queer people are still in those marginalized realms and where they still are trying to figure out ways to define themselves in opposition to how they're defined by institutions.”

Another moment Hart specifically mentioned as being integral to their artistic reflection on gender and queerness was when they discovered that Grindr had gone public on the New York Stock exchange.

“So for the ceramic piece, I was just thinking about all those things, and I was like, “I really want to make a piece about what it's like to be a gender non conforming individual from Kentucky'', and the existences of trans people in the South. And specifically trans people who aren't ready to be displayed at the New York Stock Exchange as an example of a perfectly ‘moral’ and ‘consumable’ and ‘flawless’ trans person who could run for president—like people who have all these bad behaviors and that are self destructive or unkind or whatever. To me that's a much more productive form of representation. And so that's what that piece was about. All those faces were based on different kinds of characters that I had imagined of Trans people who would be the last people to ever be on the face of a Capital One campaign. My ceramics professor was using the term ‘Grumsy’' at the time to describe ceramics—like how some things are just kind of gritty and they're not formed very perfectly or gracefully—and I was taking that term and applying it to identities and, I was like, ‘where are the grumsy queer people and how can I showcase their stories?’ Cause that's what I feel like I am.”

The ceramic piece was presented along with a performative element. Despite Hart's identification as a performance artist, they do not create art with the performance in mind.“I need an artistic idea, and then it's just like, ‘ell, it has to be performed, I guess.’” Hart views the performance process as challenging, stating that they “have to go lay down in a dark room” after, so they do not have an interest in making performance their main medium.

Hart spoke passionately about the influence that living in New York has had on their artistic process and development. Living in New York has made them want to run away from the city many times, and Hart constantly questions how much influence the city has on them versus the Columbia environment.

“I find it [being in the city] can be very distracting at the same time as it's very exciting because there's so much activity and there's so many things you find yourself wanting to do. I just find myself feeling very lost and confused a lot of the time here, and not feeling like I have the time to think or get closer to myself, like I can do in Kentucky. It's a time thing. It's like a space thing.”

“I surround myself with people who have similar qualms with the lifestyle of the city, and I try to use my work to be honest and call attention to this struggle..”

At Columbia, Hart works hard to cultivate comfortable physical and emotional spaces. Recently, they’ve been decorating their room, as well as their studio, noting their desire to “transform” the space into something unrecognizable as a standardized unit of Columbia property. Their walls are covered in fake brick wall paper, prints, sewing patterns, hanging objects and items of clothing. Every surface is filled with salvaged trinkets, that would put the most seasoned flea market goers in a state of awe.

After attending an arts magnet highschool, Hart felt burnt out coming into college. They hadn’t expected to get involved in Columbia’s art scene, but after they took their first studio drawings class they changed their mind. Hart joked that when they started down the visual arts path they felt pressure to complete both a visual arts and art history double major “in a desperate preprofessional move,” adding that once they began to work through their major classes, their longtime love of art \ became stressful and complicated.

“I think some of my most positive experiences taking art classes were the very first ones I took when I didn’t know if it was something I was going to necessarily major in, but that I did because it felt really good. Once you commit to the major, you're like, I should probably do a good job at the thing that I major in at the very least. And that, for me, added a ton of pressure and was part of the reason why I took time off between my junior and senior years, because I had to figure out a way to not have that all. I was basically only able to make stuff in sort of manic spurts. I look back at the work that I made during that time, and some of it I still feel a connection to, but I'm not sure who I was when I made some of it and I now know that I needed to figure out a way to be able to be thoughtful and spend time on my art without it being a torturous experience. There's definitely something at Columbia where it's like, if you're going to choose to do something, you must be exceptional at it.”

“It's an assertion of confidence to even be like, I major in this, and I feel good enough at this to make this the main thing I do in college, but then you're also supposed to be so good at it that you're able to immediately get a job in a field where there are truly no jobs for people graduating college, except for doing spreadsheets at a gallery, which is the very last thing I want to do.”

In terms of how they combat these pressures, Hart discussed focusing on “being a true beginner in something. I really like taking classes in stuff that I don't have experience in. There's something very comforting to me about being in that stage and not having some of the expectations that I really easily put on myself thrown at me just yet.”

As a second semester senior, Hart is beginning to plan their thesis project, and mentioned that they want to use the project to examine the concept of delusional confidence and what drives them to create art.

“The idea I have is a series of talking sculptures. They would do speeches about what's the best bathroom in the Watson studio building to have sex in with a stranger. Or I have an idea for a speech that's like, “Why I should never be marked late to class” that's about the fact that I have to figure out what my gender identity is every time I get ready in the morning and that’s hard, and so I should never be marked tardy ever. I want to do things that are intentionally ridiculous, but also honest. There are definitely aspects of existing that are absolutely fucking ridiculous, and I think I am really attracted to that delusion– people who have this sense of unshakeable purpose and confidence in themselves and what they do, because I don't have that whatsoever and so I'm fascinated by it.”

“So I do want that feeling of confidence while also recognizing that it's delusional. I think creating stuff is a very nice place for me to explore a side of myself that I feel is typically very contained. I've been trying to figure out why I would ever make anything—what gives me the right to think that I should make anything when there's already 30,000 objects here? What gives me the right to add one more to the pile of objects that exist in the world? But I also think that's a question that, if you're thinking of it all the time, you'll never make anything, and when I don't make anything I'm really sad. You have to have some delusion about the necessariness of what you're doing to do anything at all, so why not embrace that sense of delusion?”

For more information about Hart and their work, follow them on Instagram at @_horse_friend25_.

Linnea Hopkins-Ekdahl

October 25, 2023

Feature by Sayuri Govender

Photos by Jade Li

Linnea Hopkins-Ekdahl is a multimedia artist at Columbia. She works to capture the beauty of the mundane aspects of life through film photography, screenwriting and filmmaking, traditional and digital painting, collage, and print. I talked to her about renouncing perfectionism, the process of finishing a piece, fan culture, and future plans for her art.

I met Linnea Hopkins-Ekdahl in the lobby of East Campus, experiencing the slight shame of being a Barnard student and waiting to get swiped in. Luckily, her immediate warmth curbed any sense of embarrassment. Linnea’s love and warmth extends into the art she creates, in which she captures her close friends, her favorite objects, and cherished memories. As a multimedia artist, her work takes on numerous shapes and forms. Because of this, Linnea has unlearned the need for perfectionism as mastery. She instead focuses on what makes her most passionate–whether that be her newfound love of weekly collages or honing her filmmaking and screenwriting skills for her future career.

Her apartment, shared with her friends, was filled with Linnea’s art–from portraits to still lifes to film photography. Her art shared a space with vibrant print collages and ceiling-high movie posters, creating a colorful and inspired space. In the kitchen, Linnea pushed a rainbow beaded curtain aside, offering me some tea left behind by a friend from England. On the dining room table lay black and white film prints of her roomate taken by the ferris wheel at Coney Island. When I asked Linnea about her inclination towards depicting her friends in her art, she smiled, saying “I’m so happy to be able to portray them. For these photos, someone else might be like “that's cool I guess” but I see it as “oh my god that was such a fun day at Coney Island!” Whether a picture of a day at Coney Island or a painting of a moment of quiet studying, Linnea is fascinated by the mundanity of life. Her current project is her weekly collage, made up of the wonders and scraps of the week. “I collect a bunch of stuff that most people would think is trash, but I choose very carefully. My memory is not great sometimes, and it's so easy to forget what happened. I’m super interested in the process of recording my life and others’ and those small stories that you would otherwise forget about.” As we talked, she quietly took the sticker label off a discarded pound cake wrapper that would later find its place in her collage. “It's also really nice to have a private practice for yourself,” she added, “and collages are helping me let go of perfection.”

We discussed her short films, one made in her sophomore year and one during her junior year study abroad in Prague. The latter was shot fully on film–an arduous but rewarding process. “The process of shooting on film itself is so intense. You only have 2-3 rolls of film, so you can't do as many takes as you can shooting on digital. With film, sometimes you get just one take.” Her first short film–funded by Columbia University Film Productions in 2022–is currently removed from Youtube so she can re-edit and re-work it. “It was my first time writing a script and my first time doing literally anything film related” she explained, “so I was trying to teach myself while pretending I knew everything for my crew.” Her film, which followed two people trying to figure out if they were on a date or not, struck a chord in many viewers. “It wasn’t based on my life, but a lot of people said it was relatable, which was great–it shows the truth in it!” Her next steps for filmmaking would be “Writing a feature. I wouldn't make it right now, but it would be an ongoing process extending beyond graduation. I definitely want to work to improve my script writing.”

Linnea further expressed how she recently shed the idea of striving for perfection and mastery. “Since I work with so many mediums and have so many interests, it's impossible to get really good at one thing,” she mused, adding how “I spoke to a filmmaker over the summer who identified as a multimedia artist, even though they primarily focus on film. I asked them, "Where do you find the time to master all the different skills you need to do this?" And they said, "well just the word ‘master’ itself has a deeply problematic history" which is so true. It made me realize I don't want to master anything or aim for constant perfection. I can leave the unfinished behind me!” By renouncing the idea of perfection, Linnea is able to work in many mediums at once, as well as let projects breathe and have time between when she first works on them to when she finishes them.

This practice of returning to a piece of art extends beyond Linnea’s films. Her process for painting maintains a dedicated attention to detail. She told me how a painting of a friend was currently sitting downstairs, and is “in danger of me repainting it. I'm itching to get my hands on it, but I don't want to ruin it.” I asked her how she knew a painting was done or if any of her work ever felt truly finished. “It depends on when I’m satisfied,” she explained, “some are unfinished and I don’t feel the desire to finish it, but I know it could come later. Some are done because the varnish is on it. But, the thing I like the most about painting, especially oil paints, is that you can work it over and over and over again. I don't believe in mistakes while painting.”

Besides my love for Linnea’s portraits, I was captivated by a piece of her Captain America collection–a play on the “Cabinet of Curiosities” trope with a heartfelt but fan-oriented subject. When I asked her about it, she told me how “I believe in having fun with things. But even though it is a silly subject matter, fan culture is a thing that's taken very seriously. It's something that can get people through dark places, and also let people express things they might not usually be able to explore.” Linnea’s interest in fan culture comes from her own participation. We talked about shared experiences with fandom, especially the artistic output of fandom. When I asked her about the process of creating fanart versus traditional works, she stopped me to address the stigmas around fanart. “I think that idea of ‘progress’ is super interesting,” she started, “it brings up the concept of high and low art and what is overall considered art. Fanart is considered low art that you move on from and replace with high art–but so many great works are fanart or fanfiction. I mean, Good Omens is like Bible fanfiction, Dante’s Inferno is his fanfiction, and some pop art is fanart. I have read so many beautiful works of fanfiction, and seen so many beautiful works of fanart–better than some contemporary art I’ve seen.”

Fandom still holds a place in Linnea’s work today. Leaned against her bedroom window is a pair of two-toned vibrant screen printed images of Bucky Barnes, along with numerous postcards, film photographs, and paintings from her favorite artists. It tells a story of her time at Columbia with her friends–memorialized in printed photos, the skills passed down to her from her family, and the art that continues to inspire her today. On her shelf were two film cameras: her grandfather’s old film camera and her father’s Nikon from the 90s that she's used for years. “I love old cameras and seeing if I can get them to work,” she explained. It was clear that family played a significant role in her life, as Linnea also mentioned how her grandmother went to art school before becoming a nurse, musing how “I feel like creativity is in my blood”.

In five years time, Linnea is unsure where she will be, but is hopeful about her future. “I’m trying to figure out what balance of things I want to create for myself. So many people fall into their jobs or have job titles that they wouldn't have known existed in the past. There could be something out there that I don’t even know exists now! So hopefully, I will find whatever my niche is in New York. And maybe have a dog.” In terms of being a multimedia artist, Linnea expressed her desire to find a deeper connection between the mediums she works in. “I definitely want to connect my work more. I think that's what I'm turning towards now–collage and mixed media animation where the technique is more physical. With animation, I can combine my enjoyment of collage, painting and film.”

Linnea’s art transcends typical notions of mastery and tradition in favor of depicting the things she cherishes the most. As her work finds homes in new and old mediums, she beautifully captures the familiar, the beloved, and the wonders of the mundane.

Norman Godinez

October 25, 2023

Feature by Sahai John

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Weitz

October 23, 2023

Feature by Fatima AlAryani

Photos by Frances Cohen and Lauren Zhou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch his video interview:

Seiji Murakami

October 17, 2023

Feature by Julia Tolda

Photos by Amelia Fay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rommel Nunez

May 17, 2023

Feature by Iker Veiga

Photos by Kendall Bartell

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

How did you start making art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you tell us more about the punctum?

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

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

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

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

Everybody loves Ratrock!

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

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

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

August Cao

May 16, 2023

Feature by Nora Cazenave

Photos by Frances Cohen

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

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

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

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

How does photography fit in?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What kind of things did you go through?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you have other artistic inspirations?

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

Talk more about the importance of authenticity in your work!

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

Can you tell me about your tattoos?

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

Is there anything else you want people to know?

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

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

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

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

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

Warren McCombs

April 29, 2023

Feature by Stuart Beal

Photos by Adela Schwartz

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

We approach Schermerhorn and it’s raining.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McCombs has a much stronger hold than most.

Cat Luo

April 29, 2023

Feature by Korrin Lee

Photos by August Cao

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria Reshetnikov

April 29, 2023

Feature by Sahai John

Photos by Sungyoon Lim

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

When did you first start creating art?

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

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

Where do you draw the majority of your inspiration from?

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

How does living in New York City influence your work?

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

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

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

How has Columbia influenced your art career?

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

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

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

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

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

What artists inspire you and influence your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what ways do you portray trauma in your art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where can we find more of your work?

My Instagram @vilinda.a and my website!

Danielle Sung

April 29, 2023

Feature by Sayuri Govender

Photos by Will Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What message do you wish to convey with your art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathryn Whitten

April 28, 2023

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Anais Mitelberg

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

Tell me a little about your relationship with art.

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

Why do you make art?

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

How did you venture into different kinds of mediums?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are some of those practical challenges?

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

Then, do you exclusively work from reference?

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

Have you ever tried to make abstract pieces?

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

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

What are your favorite pieces in your catalog?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Luca Benzimra

April 26, 2023

Feature by Brontë Grimmer

Photos by Jade Li and Caroline Cavalier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there anything else you want to share?

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

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

My Instagram, my handle is @lucabenzimra.

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

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

Grace Li

April 20, 2023

Feature by Yam Pothikamjorn

Photos by Will Park

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

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

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

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

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

You can find Grace’s work at:

@gracestills on Instagram

https://www.gracestills.com

Sophie Johnson

April 12, 2023

Feature by Julia Tolda

Photos by Frances Cohen

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

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

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

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

SJ: Sure, if you wouldn't mind.

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

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

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

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

JT: Where are you from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JT: What motifs are ubiquitous in your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JT: Where do you draw your inspiration from?

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

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

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

JT: What about body horror draws you in?

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

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

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

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

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

JT: Do you see art as a challenge?

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

Forest Wong

April 11, 2023

Feature by Susana Crane Ruge

Photos by Emily Lord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SC: Was this piece specific to certain family customs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

SC: How have you changed your approach to art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SC: How have you coped with that?

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

SC: How do you see yourself continuing your work?

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

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

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

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

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