Continuity with Emily Tat

Continuity I, 2017

Artist and illustrator Emily Tat moved to New York with her partner this past fall. Her style incorporates ink drawing and watercolor, sometimes tracing her figures in water and allowing the ink to seep into the damp paper. Ralph Steadman is an easy comparison, and one that she invites. “It’s such a compliment because he is fucking amazing. He uses protractors to make these very straight lines and protractors to draw the eyes. But all around the figures is just ink everywhere.”

Her current style is a recent development in her artistic career. “I used to do photorealistic oil paintings. When I was doing my degree in my final painting course, I had a very specific style, and I felt that I had to stick to it. I got criticized very badly by the professors. So I decided to go another way and began making video art, but I never felt quite into what I was doing. Shortly after I started dating my partner, Guido, we were in his dorm room, he was playing music and I felt like drawing. He only had this calligraphy pen that I still use. It forced me to draw loosely in a way that I never had to before. My favorite thing about drawing this way is that I feel that I can be very abstract and mess around with overlapping colors and spilling ink. I also like it to be very clean, with lots of negative space around what I’m drawing. I never sketch things out, so sometimes I run into the edge of pages.”

Guido, 2015

Portraiture is an incredibly important aspect of Emily’s oeuvre, and she strives to capture her sitter’s essence while keeping the form minimal and legible. “I think it’s important to get the form of something, and to keep its structure. At the same time I like to add these weird, abstract elements to it. I do it a lot with feet and hands, and to exaggerate limbs and fingers. It’s important to capture the structure of someone’s face. I was doing a commission for this couple, and they said they really felt that I captured both of them and their connection to each other. That is the depth that is important for me to capture in a drawing… What I’m driving for is for them to see the portrait and say ‘that’s me!’ I get frustrated with myself very quickly. If I feel that I haven’t captured someone it, then it really upsets me.”

Galentines Day, 2018

What captivates Emily most when portraying subjects are sharp and angular features, but capturing these characteristics is not her main goal. The ritual and process of portraiture is what attracts her to that type of work. “When I first started doing this kind of work, a lot of people asked to pose for me. It’s just really nice when someone wants that moment. If you think about it, unless you’re in a relationship with someone how often do you get to look at someone’s face? You forget things like what color someone’s eyes are or the shape of their nose. You only get to know that when you look at someone’s face over time. So it’s really nice to have that 3 or 4-hour period where I can take a friend, or someone I don’t even know at all, and really look at them. It can make someone very vulnerable if they are posing naked. People often do it when they want a bit of validation or a little moment for themselves. I think people often don’t get enough attention, and so it’s really nice to have the opportunity to give people that recognition.”

“Since I’ve moved here I’ve had some ups and downs, but I feel as if I am having resurgence” Emily said. She started making single-line drawings, creating still lifes and portraits without lifting her pen from the paper. “I really love it because everything that is in my head can just spill out onto the page. It’s very reflective of the medium that I use as well, because ink is very quick and you have to make decisions immediately.” Her subjects have also become more personal since starting these single-line drawings. Emily showed me a drawing of her and her friend Julia and a drawing of a jar of nutmeg. “[Julia] is just one of my most special friends in the whole entire world. Ever since we met, we have had this incredible friendship that’s never faltered. I don’t have that many friendships like that. Doing a portrait in this way is really reflective of how I feel about her. I enjoyed making single-line drawings of things that comforted me, since I had just moved here. Even though things are different and weird in this country, these drawings remind me of the things in my life that are continuous. It goes beyond relationships between me and other people. There are ones of certain foods that are special to me, because my homesickness manifests itself often through food. Guido and I have this jar of whole nutmeg in our kitchen. Back in London he kept banging on about how he wanted whole nutmeg in the kitchen and he couldn’t find it anywhere, so I found some for him we I went to the south of France. It’s this continuity from our kitchen in London to our kitchen here that mirrors the continuity of our relationship.”

Nutmeg, 2017

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You can see more work by Emily Tat on her website.

Getting Seen and Feeling Good with Joshua Byron

“I write a lot about what it means to go viral,” Joshua Byron told me somewhere in the middle of our conversation. The question of internet virality – or as Joshua also puts it, the question of being seen – is something I’d been wrestling with personally for months when it came to this very publication. Just as we decided to produce one final issue of Things Created By People, we got an email from Joshua with a pitch for their latest film project, Idle Cosmopolitan. It was a lucky accident.

Idle Cosmopolitan, which was recently re-released by glo worm, stars Joshua as a relationship writer who enters an alternate dimension. Relationships, romance, and their intersection with trans identity lay at the center of Joshua’s work, whether it’s one of their many video projects, their non-binary dating columns, Neurotic Dope and Trans Monogamist, or their book, NB Carrie Bradshaw.

Joshua is often at the center of their own work in a way that is incredibly intimate. It’s easy to believe that the Joshua you are seeing on-screen or in words is the Joshua Byron you’ll get in real life. But Joshua is a self-described “very intentional person.” While I am consistently amazed at how raw their work is, it is also thought out, curated, intentional. If you’re seeing a part of Joshua Byron, it is because they wanted you to see it. What does it mean to be seen? To seek out being seen, to then not be seen? These questions run through the core of Joshua’s work, and our conversation.

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This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Joshua Byron: I think Idle Cosmopolitan came out of this desire to meld the sensibilities that I was exploring. I’d seen a lot of Sex and the City, but I also came out of this very experimental background. I really wanted to combine what I was interested in and the themes I was thinking through, which are usually very immediate, and usually presented in very autobiographical narratives, with something a little bit more abstract, and more like Haruki Murakami.

I think a lot of it came out of a desire to think through sex and love in a way that was more than one-note. It’s an experimental, semi-autobiographical narrative about not getting married at 21. That’s what the press release said. It’s sort of like how life devolves into these endless forks in the road. In this case, it’s about a relationship advice writer who keeps going left instead of right and gets dragged along by no force of their own. And not even just led by outside forces, but just ends up going into a queer world, which is sort of an alternate dimension.

Adam Cecil: I think the other way I saw it described on your website was “a ghost story about the queer world.”

Joshua: Yeah, that’s the easier way to blurb it. It’s a ghost story, it’s about an alternate dimension, and it’s about death, in a light-hearted way.

Adam: You were telling me that your book NB Carrie Bradshaw is not a diary. And it’s definitely not structured at all like that. But the quality of the writing is very much so ripped from the pages of a diary. How do you keep that quality when you’re curating and condensing and editing?

Joshua: I think it’s a very careful distinction, and it’s something that I’ve thought a lot about. Okay, so, vulnerability. How is it different in terms of art, right? Because we always think this artist is giving themselves to us. It’s sort of a strange metaphor that we have when somebody’s being open. But I really don’t think it’s true because they’re giving us an object, and that’s it. I think vulnerability is much more reciprocal, it’s much more unfiltered. But an object, you can’t ask it a question. You can’t get more out of it than there is.

For me, it’s much harder to labor on an object that feels vulnerable, but you’re not giving your whole self. You’re not dumping a diary on somebody. A book, while vulnerable, is not the same. I can give you something, and you can see me, but I can’t see you. And I can still hold back.

Adam: But for somebody who’s reading it, they’re playing around with your vulnerability without you there. To me, that’s terrifying.

Joshua: Right. There were a few things that I took out from the book that I was like, “That’s too vulnerable for this context, I don’t want this here.” But there’s nothing in there now that I would think, “Oh, I hope somebody doesn’t read this.” Different people have said, “Wow, I would never have said that.” But this is just the work that I do, the work that I do requires it. This is the tool, this is the medium. Some people work in shapes and colors, and I’m thinking through vulnerability.

Adam: You’ve created a lot of video work under the guise a vlog. Thinking about your work being diary-ish, I’m wondering how you conceptualize the vlog as a medium or art form.

Joshua: My college thesis was on vlogs.

Adam: Oh, perfect.

Joshua: But I am not good at vlogging. Part of what I discovered through thinking through vlogs is that it’s meant for a certain kind of person, it is meant for a certain type of experience. And it’s not an experience I’m good at giving.

But what’s equally important about vlogs is that they’re diaries. They’re not political. They are easily disseminated. There is an emphasis on production quality, and on the attraction and intimacy that is maybe sexual with the person who’s speaking. And maybe they have an accent. That’s another big part of the vlogger. It helps. It doesn’t hurt.

Oh, and usually they have a vague side-project that they try and launch eventually. That sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. The vlog is not the means to an end. It’s always a vehicle for a person or a brand.

My vlogs were more of a means to an end. It was just like, “Here’s the vlog. Here’s what it is.” And I don’t fit a lot of those qualities! But I wanted to see what it was like. Also, I was more interested in using vlogs as a collage space. I was really into Jonas Mekas at the time, when he was doing his video a day project, which I thought was much more engaging than the typical vlog culture.

Of course, there’s also the whole trans vlog community, which has its own collectivity. But it also has that sort of self-destructive, like, certain people are privileged more, certain trans bloggers get more views, etc. So it’s a more contested space that still has all the things about the internet that are controversial. One of the things I discovered, which I don’t think is that surprising, is that white vloggers are getting the most views. It’s also usually the ones who look like they can pass the most, or who have the most inspirational story while looking good doing it. Which is kind of wild!

There are people who have the inspirational journey video, where they show pre-hormone, post-hormone videos. A lot of people feel comfortable doing that, and the people who feel comfortable doing those videos are not wrong for doing it. If that’s how they feel good about their journey, that’s totally valid. But I think for people who don’t transition, or who don’t have the money to transition, or who feel really volatile about pre-hormone or pre-coming-out pictures, those are not the kind of videos they’re going to put up. But those are the videos that the average viewer wants to see, because it’s spectacle. The kind of videos that get privileged are the spectacles, which have this tie to sex.

Adam: Let me back up a little. Thinking about what makes you a bad vlogger – you list out these qualities that go into a vlog as a medium. How did you tackle it knowing that you don’t fit these qualities and knowing that what you’re doing is not what everyone else is doing?

Joshua: I was really interested in the idea that it was a way to keep working. It was a great way to be like, “Okay, this doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be great.” But it’s a great to keep cutting those artistic teeth.

Some were much more interesting and engaging than others. There’s this one where I’m just walking around my living room, and I’m just yelling at things. And then it’s cutting between pictures that I drew. Then there are a few clips of the outside. I think part of it was that I was thinking about domestic and non-domestic spaces, and how are we authentic in different spaces, and how does that change when you collage them together.

I was super into Steve Roggenbuck at the time, so I was thinking through things like who gets to be viral, and what is viral. I wasn’t viral for a number of reasons. But I think that became less important as I was experimenting with collage, and experimenting with, like, “This vlog feels good, this vlog doesn’t, and why is that?” If you’re going to adhere to the rubric, then what makes a good vlog?

Adam: When you started, did you want to go viral?

Joshua: I don’t know if I wanted to go viral. But the goal wasn’t to just have them sit there on YouTube and not do anything. Which is kind of what they became. I did it for six, seven months, and then I realized that it was not how I liked to work.

Adam: If you had gone viral or achieved some level of superficial success, do you think that would’ve changed the way you thought about it or approached it?

Joshua: I think I would’ve done it a lot longer, but I would’ve had to do it for a year or two before anything like that could’ve happened, so that’s already a huge block. I’m also not traditionally attractive, and I don’t mean that as a slight, just you know, in traditional beauty politics. So, it’s hard for me to imagine what that would have been like. It would have felt radical, and not in a political way, but it just would’ve felt like a very big change.

Adam: Do you feel like any kind of work that goes through social media, whether it’s YouTube or something else, is just inherently unsuccessful if it doesn’t achieve some sort of virality?

Joshua: No, no, I don’t think that’s true. But I also don’t think failure is a bad thing! I think failing at one sense of success isn’t the worst thing in the world.

I think people are heralding social media as sort of a democratizer – everyone could have success. But I think it’s actually just the same replication of publishing and media theory that we’ve always seen. Maybe more people have access, and there are great things, revolutions and scary things like that, but there’s still a level of capitalism. Lighting is money! I think that a big thing that Instagram has is that the right lighting is money. That’s a big of part of it – to either have the money to have great lights in your house, or to go to a space that has good lighting, which poor places don’t.

So, I think I’m a little cynical about how social media works.

But I don’t think it’s always bad. I think it has definitely given us things that allow more people to have platforms. Who’s getting that platform and how they’re allowed to use it, I think is a question that has kept coming up in my own work.

I think a lot about the practice of how I’m disseminating my work, and in NB Carrie Bradshaw, I write a lot about what it means to go viral. What does it mean to be visible? How is that connected to identity politics? How is it connected to emotional vulnerability? What does it mean if somebody wants to be seen, and then their Instagram only gets five likes? I think there’s something interesting there.

People may say, “Well, that’s dumb, they shouldn’t care.” But it’s a lot easier to say that than it is to feel that. I think being visible is one of the big human questions that we all want. How do we show up and get seen by other people in a way that feels good? I think social media can kind of twist that question into “How do we get seen?” Not, “How do we get seen and it feels good,” just, “How do we get seen?”

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“I don’t think of social media as a medium that I use,” Joshua told me. “We’re accelerating, and my work is not fast-paced.” I admire this quality in Joshua’s work – in a world that is constantly moving forward, it can be nice to sit down and watch a video about a person walking around their living room and yelling at things. But it’s also the fact that the very thing that Joshua is working with – vulnerability – requires us to slow down. It’s not a recipe for massive viewer numbers on the internet, but as Joshua says, there’s more to their work than just being seen. “What does it mean to be seen, and what does it mean to have fun? Can that be the same thing?” Joshua asked themselves at the end of our conversation. “I think it can. It’s a less tangible but more inviting idea of success.”

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Find more of Joshua’s work on their website.

Vardaan Arora: How OCD and India made a popstar

I have a playlist on Spotify. It’s called “Nat’s Perfect Playlist,” and it is perfect. I don’t know where on Spotify I discovered “Feel Good Song,” but I know it was immediately added to my pristine playlist. I couldn’t help jamming out to the sultry pop song while at work; I kept it on repeat. To my surprise, the artist behind the song was my age – and an NYU alum, too. He’d done covers before this, but nothing that circulated nearly as wide. My association of today’s top pop music with reality TV singing competitions, breakout social media stars, and the status quo musicians was expunged. You didn’t need a fanbase to sing a song and get people to listen to it. Just ask Vardaan Arora.

Natalia Lehaf: I heard your song on Spotify.

Vardaan Arora: Yeah, it was on a bunch of playlists on Spotify. It was on the “Mood Booster” playlist where it is gaining the most traction.

NL: That’s really cool. Did you upload it to Spotify and Spotify picked it up?

VA: I recorded the song in June in Nashville. I wrote it myself. I had worked with a producer named Kevin Leach I met in L.A. It all happened in a day. I had lyric and melody ideas with me, but it came to me in the studio. We released it the month after, because post-production took a few weeks. I had a release party in New York, with supportive friends and family who decided to buy the song – even though people don’t really buy music these days. I think Spotify picked up on people listening to it and has an algorithm that picks up on early adapter songs, and it ended up on viral charts. It’s crazy how Spotify helped put it out there; I use Spotify to find new music all the time. In terms of gaining exposure and traction, Spotify has been the most helpful. It’s also a testament to artists in 2016 – we can release something without a label and with the help of streaming services, like Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube. So many people have been reaching out telling me that my song is playing at the bar they’re at or the store – and it’s really cool.

NL: What were you doing there in L.A.?

VA: I lived in L.A. for six months after graduating. I went to NYU for acting and the “New York vs. L.A.” decision is huge for actors. I wanted to see what it was like to live there. I didn’t really like it – I don’t love L.A. After living in New York, I can’t live anywhere else. I’m a very social person and it’s a lot easier to meet up with friends in New York than L.A. Who wants to drive for 45 minutes just to see a movie with a friend? Also, everyone there is in the entertainment industry. I like meeting people from all different walks of life, and L.A. was a little monotonous for me. Even the food. L.A. has great produce and Mexican food, but when I want different cuisines like Indian or Thai, New York is much better.

NL: But, one of the downsides to the city is the limited space. Where was your release party in the city?

VA: I got a suite at a hotel in the Lower East Side. I played the song a few times – not back to back, throughout the night – and gave a little speech about the song.

NL: What did you say in your speech?

VA: I gave them insight into the meaning behind the song. It’s an upbeat, dance-y, fun song that’s supposed to make you feel good, right? But the message behind the song is to bring attention to what it means to feel good on your own terms. Not: everyday is going to be a good day, and when you’re having a bad day, you shouldn’t be expected to feel good because other people are telling you to. A lot of pop songs tell you to put your hands up in the air, and this song is like, “No, I won’t do that because I don’t want to do that right now.” It brings awareness to mental health issues, like when you’re feeling down and depressed and people are telling you to cheer up, but it’s not possible for you to cheer up in the moment. So it’s like, “I’ll close my eyes and sing my feel good song” – so whatever that means to you, whatever you need to do to bring yourself up, you should do without trying to meet other people’s expectations about what feeling good means.

NL: Did anything in your life inspire the song, particularly its touch on mental health?

VA: Yeah, in 2013 I was diagnosed with OCD. I drew from different experiences as a result of that to write this song. It’s about taking it day by day, and knowing that the thing that's bothering you right now might not even bother you tomorrow at the same time. It’s through the institutional paths mentality of “just breathe and revel in it and acknowledge you're feeling this way but do not get sucked into it.”

NL: How has having OCD affected your life?

VA: It’s one of the most debilitating illnesses. It got to the point where it was really bad and I couldn’t do everyday normal tasks because I had to repeat certain activities and had to do compulsions, so I would never really be present in the moment. Obviously, being treated for it was super helpful and becoming more aware of how your brain works was super helpful. It’s chronic and it’s easy to relapse and fall into bad habits and do compulsions all the time, but it’s like a battle and you have to keep going.

NL: What are everyday tasks that you’d have to repeat?

VA: For example, if I had a negative or intrusive thought while I was entering a room, I’d have to walk out of the room and un-do the thought and walk into the room again. The same with sending texts or plugging in your phone. I just did a video with Project UROK talking about my OCD and reaching out to others who have it. A lot of times you feel like you’re alone, when you’re not, which is why I reach out to people on Twitter and join support groups for it. It’s nice to talk to other people who have OCD. And OCD is an illness that’s been murdered by the media because people say things like, “Oh I am so organized, I have OCD,” and it’s a completely different beast.

Vardaan Arora (@vardaanarora) is an actor in NYC. In this video he talks about his experience with anxiety, OCD, and how he found relief in the US as well as in India. Learn more about Vardaan here: http://www.vardaanarora.com.

NL: How do you feel about people who trivialize OCD?

VA: I hate it so much. I know people who do it all the time, and I don’t say anything because I don’t want to be that guy who is, like, politically correct about a mental disorder. Because people say things like that all the time, like, “Oh, I am so schizophrenic” and “oh, he’s so bipolar.” And it’s like: Are you really? Is he really?

NL: Knowing that makes me think about the song differently.

VA: Oh, yeah, if you go back to the song and listen to the lyrics again, it makes a lot more sense probably. Because people think of it as, you go dancing to it – which is good, too, because I want people to think that. I don’t exactly want people to be going through the exact same journey when listening to it, but for me, personally, it means something different.

NL: So, you went to Nashville to meet this producer from L.A. and you knew the words and melody, but it all came to place in the studio, right?

VA: Yeah, so I’d get lyric ideas in the middle of the night, or on the flight over there, but it all came together then. He laid down a beat and I sang over it.

NL: How long were you in the studio for?

VA: I think four or five hours. We recorded the entire song in a few hours and then the next day I went into a different studio and tracked all the vocals there, so I redid the vocals. So it took one day to write the song and have a version for it, and another day to re-do the vocals. I was only there one weekend.

NL: Was that a lot of pressure?

VA: I would say yes if I thought about it, but I was so overwhelmed and excited that I didn’t see it as being a lot of pressure. That’s when I knew that I love songwriting, because it came so easily. It was interesting to see that my own song was stuck in my head a day after recording.

NL: It’s even more interesting because you have OCD and are still going through treatment for it, but you were able to create a three minute song in two days.

VA: So, OCD – what it does is try to give you intrusive images and thoughts that aren’t true but feel true when they’re in your head. If I get a thought, like, “everybody hates your song,” I would have to do a compulsion and make a list of all the people who like it in my head until I feel better. And that would make me feel good for about ten minutes until the thought popped back into my head again. The more compulsions you do, the more it reinforces the obsession. So while I was there, I needed to be on the phone with my therapist, but because I was so excited and passionate about writing this song, it helped me overcome the OCD. When something exciting and big happens, the OCD takes a backseat – because it plays with you when your mind is a little empty, too. People like to think about OCD as a monster that’s always yelling things at you, and if you entertain what they are yelling, they get bigger and bigger.

NL: So you recorded one song; are you working on more music now?

VA: I was in Nashville again last month. I recorded another song. It’s a little slower – still pop, still catchy – but I am using more of my lower register. It’s cool. I’m also working on a music video for “Feel Good Song.” That’s what’s next before the next song comes out.

NL: Where are you shooting the music video?

VA: In New York. I don’t want to give too much away, but I think it’s in a parking lot in Queens. The director is finalizing dates and locations now. There’s going to be a dance in it, which is cool.

Vardaan Arora - Feel Good Song Directed by Ian Moran Choreographed by Nicole Johnson Buy it on iTunes: http://apple.co/29AEG37 Stream it on Apple Music: http://apple.co/29Bw9Jd Stream it on Spotify: http://spoti.fi/29PHTu8 Buy it on Amazon Music: http://smarturl.it/feelgoodsongamazon Twitter: http://twitter.com/vardaanarora Instagram: http://instagram.com/vardaanarora © Copyright 2016

NL: You’re from NYU acting, I am sure you have a lot of friends trying to break into this industry as well. How did they receive the song, and are you working with any of them on anything?

VA: I’m not working with anyone at the moment, but I am seeing a lot of people make their own stuff, which is awesome. I think that’s what people need to start doing – especially in the acting industry – you can’t just wait around for the phone to ring. It’s easy to forget why you chose to do this thing anyway, especially when you start to look at it as a business than an art form.

NL: I feel like so many people are waiting for their big break, but here you are putting your song out there on your own – no label, nothing.

VA: Yeah, you can get attention for your work. Obviously, you need to have the finances for it, which is the hardest part, but it’s possible.

NL: How much does it cost to record in the studio?

VA: It depends on the studio, but I know the studios in Nashville are a little cheaper because they are so many of them. It’s usually an hourly rate, like $70 or $80 an hour.

NL: I love the idea that in 2016 you can put your music out there, and I know there is some controversy with Spotify because they pay their artists very minimally.

VA: Yeah, I can’t say anything bad about Spotify because if you are up-and-coming you can’t afford to not be on a certain platform because they don’t pay you enough. You know? Because you don’t have the influence, you’re not Taylor Swift – Taylor Swift doesn’t have her music on Spotify and she says she is doing it for up-and-coming artists, but I don’t believe that. I almost owe my entire career to Spotify. Yes, they don’t pay enough – but think about all of the other great things they do for you, not just as an artist, but as a user. People would be listening to music illegally a lot more often without Spotify; people are listening to music legally in 2016 because of Spotify.

NL: Before this all erupted and you got this big break, what were you doing? Are you still pursuing acting?

VA: My student visa expired shortly after I moved to LA, because I am originally from New Delhi. So I moved back to India and I lived there for 6 months and then I got a green card and was settling back into New York City. While I was settling, I decided I really wanted to write a song and thought that if I didn’t do it now, when would I ever do it?

NL: You grew up in India and then came to New York for acting school?

VA: Correct. And through acting school, I’ve been able to get rid of my accent. I switch back whenever I am talking to my mom, though. America has always been one of my favorite countries to visit. I always felt like I fit in better here – with my sense of humor and taste in music, although now with this election I am not so sure.

NL: How did you decide on acting?

VA: I was always creative and always loved singing and acting from a young age. It’s something that’s always been a passion for me.

NL: I am first-generation and growing up with parents as immigrants allowed me a cool perspective of watching people acclimate to the American culture. What was that like for you?

VA: It wasn’t as hard as you might think. I found more like-minded people here, especially at NYU. I connect much better with people here than India. I also grew up watching a lot of American TV shows. What I am doing is not the norm in India. This industry is different from Bollywood – it’s more about the work than the glamour.

NL: How did you feel when you moved back to India? Were you depressed, after coming all this way only to have to go back?

VA: Yes – exactly. I was in limbo. I was just waiting for my green card to go through, and I hate waiting for things to happen. I applied for a green card when I turned 21 and got it when I was 23, so about two and a half years. I got lucky with that, some people have to wait a lot longer.

NL: Wow, and then you came here and got right to it.

VA: Exactly.

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For more of Vardaan's music, check out his website.

New York on a Canvas: Art by David Bransfield

New York City is not a place. It’s an experience. The buildings are high, apartments small, and streets overpopulated – but it never feels claustrophobic. Artists have tried to replicate its paradoxical beauty for as long as both the city and art have existed. And although the New York experience can’t be framed, artist David Bransfield has managed to bring his experiences of New York to life.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Natalia Lehaf: How do you describe yourself as an artist?

David Bransfield: This is a totalizing question that is never easy for an artist to answer, especially because at this point in time I seem to be interested in many contrasting ideas and mediums. Overall, I would say that the common thread of my interests is the experiences and memories involved in the creation and immersion of a space. My previous work has spanned from ideas about geometry to urban landscapes to extremely conceptual depictions of surreal spaces, and I think that all of these ideas have a very specific relationship to the individual viewer.

NL: What’s your background in art, both academically and personally?

DB: I have always been extremely curious as to how things are made, both from an artistic and architectural standpoint. My interests in both art and architecture turned into a career choice around 9th grade. I began attending an after-school art program on Long Island called the Huntington School of Fine Arts, where for the first time I was trained in the classical mediums of drawing, painting, and sculpting. I spent a couple years there and grew exponentially as an artist, and then from there I attended NYU as a double major in Studio Art and Urban Design & Architectural Studies.

NL: Your sketches and paintings of New York City are very lifelike and precise. What is your relationship with the city?

DB: I grew up on the Queens/Long Island border only 20 minutes from Manhattan, so New York is my home. New York has always had an intense influence on how I think about art and architecture. Coming from such a rich and diverse place, I have always been interested in the makeup of communities as an insular composition of like-minded people, especially in New York where there are still many ethnic and religious-based communities. What interests me is how each of these communities come together to form a larger area that many people consider the “melting pot” that is NYC, yet there is still a definite division between neighborhoods, each with their own character and influence on each other. It is the dissection of “micro” versus “macro” in terms of the individual and the community that I have been trying to dissect in my more recent work. I am also extremely interested in this in terms of architecture and urban planning as well.

NL: What’s your process like?

DB: I’ll talk about the process for my most recent series of paintings, which were 6 to 10-foot urban landscape oil paintings. I began by assigning myself a large urban area to explore, which in this case was Chinatown. Then I wander. I find that wandering instead of trying to seek specific spaces can sometimes be more rewarding. If you have too specific of a goal, you will lose all sense of exploration in an attempt to find this goal and you may miss many unexpected opportunities. I had a set of guidelines to follow (finding spaces with rich color palettes, graffiti, and interesting people) but I let myself explore within these guidelines. For my first several wanderings I simply walk around and document spaces. I then go through my photographs and choose spaces which I believe have the most rewarding compositions and environments, and revisit these sites several more times for extended periods to capture a specific scene I wish to convey in my painting. After I decide on a composition which I believe makes for the best painting (this could be a single photograph or an agglomeration of several), I then make a series of sketches to resolve any compositional issues. This entire process generally lasts about 2 to 3 weeks before I begin the actual painting. The paintings themselves usually take about the same amount of time, and I try to stick with just one to two paintings at a time so I can focus on them without too many other distractions. I find that, personally, if I do not complete a piece within a reasonable amount of time or if I stop and revisit the piece later then it often turns out fragmented. Other than that, I do not focus too much on setting rules for myself while painting. I often find that the painting itself will dictate the rules of its creation, and I do not set these rules until I have already started painting. Stylistic rules will sort themselves out as the piece is being created. In terms of completion, I never feel like my paintings are truly finished. It is really just a matter of reaching a point where I am comfortable stopping, which I know is coming when I begin to get sick of the painting!

NL: You’re out of the city and studying architecture at Yale now. Are you continuing to paint and draw?

DB: I am still practicing art here, but I guess it depends on your definition of art. I am doing a lot of drawing (not as much painting because it is not as relative to the practice of architecture) but the drawings I am doing now serve more of a utilitarian purpose in that they are meant to convey the essence of my architectural projects. I would definitely argue that this is still an artistic form because there are infinite possibilities about how you convey your project, which will ultimately determine how the architecture is perceived. In this way it is almost just as important to have a strong representation of your building than to have a strong building itself. I am also learning to become extremely proficient with computer programs and to bring together multiple mediums in a single drawing which is exciting. I hope that after my time in architecture school I will be able to mix my skills and concepts learned from both art and architecture and find a truly intriguing and original artistic path for myself.

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For more of David's work, check out his website.

The Rise and Shine of Amy Leon

Amy and I met at Friedman’s in Midtown West, both of us so insistent on eating chicken and waffles that we requested our waitress check again that the waffle machine was broken. We met just shortly after Amy’s audition for a play called The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World by Suzan-Lori Parks. Amy was in a euphoric state–one that even a broken waffle machine couldn’t curtail.

This would be the case regardless of a great audition, I would later decide.

“The casting director had already bought tickets for my show in August,” Amy said in a naturally booming voice. (Her show at Joe’s Pub, two months after our lunch, was a sold out performance.) This blandishment did not grant Amy a sense of security that would silence her prayers about the role. “It’s such an important piece,” she explained. “I haven’t been acting since I graduated, and this is the first role that I’ve ever wanted. I was like, ‘Wow. I can go be black somewhere?’ It’s not about me–and it’s important. It was written in 1989, which is crazy, because there’s a whole section of it that’s like, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.’ She wrote this twenty years ago and here we are talking about the same shit.”

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In 2015, New York University asked Amy to perform at an event where Trayvon Martin’s mother would be speaking. As a gifted raconteuse, Amy felt a crucial obligation to say the right words–or more importantly, for Trayvon Martin’s mother to hear the right words. “Something that you see a lot when somebody dies–my mother just died in February–is people being very apologetic about your situation when they don’t know the full story. The situation demands pity. I don’t like pity.” She spoke with an élan that seized my motor skills and had me nodding along in consensus, deserting my ignorance of grief and its surrounding characteristics. It was not until a few months later, when I experienced a loss of my own, that I could understand.

“This is a testament of faith,” Amy continued. “The fact that this woman is going around the world and talking about her situation right after it happened. She woke up the very next day and had the same job; she didn’t win the lottery, nothing changed. She’s wearing the same clothes. She still has other kids. She still has to wake up everyday, sleep everyday, eat everyday. And suddenly everyone’s talking about her son, making t-shirts about her son, making fun of her son, making Halloween costumes out of her son. So what does she want to hear?” This wasn’t a question. She left no time for me to answer. “An identification of resilience.”

Amy performed her song “Burning in Birmingham” at the event. The song evokes the events of September 15, 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, a day when members of the Ku Klux Klan planted dynamites beneath the front steps of 16th Street Baptist Church. Four girls died that day. “But there were five girls in the bathroom,” Amy said, voice still booming. “And Sarah Collins is alive today, under 70, still missing her right eye. She lost her sister and her best friends all at once. Didn’t even get to go to the funeral because she was at the hospital. She’s still paying medical bills today. And she’s watching this shit go down? How dare she have to watch this shit go down. How dare she have to pay for this. Nobody knows about her because she survived. The black woman has been surviving all this time and nobody’s looking at her, and she’s continuing to see all this shit.”

Amy’s pain was exacerbated by the negligible status of black women in the country, a matter she portrayed in the music video for “Burning in Birmingham.” She released the music video for it a few days before our meeting in June. “When it came to making the video, I knew I wanted black women because we are invisible–black women are last on the totem pole.” Her argument was simple: at least the death of black men is televised. “That’s why at the end of the video there’s a lot more bodies than those four little girls because the death is cyclical. It’s still happening. It’s still going. I don’t know when I am going to see a day when it’s not happening, but I am prepared to speak about it. And that’s why it doesn’t end on all the bodies–because I am not going to be crying forever, I am going to melt, breakdown, and then I am going to come back here and talk to you. And even if that’s the only time that I am healing, when I am talking to you about it, that’s what I am going to do.”

"Burning in Birmingham" BUY NOW: https://amyleon.bandcamp.com/track/burning-in-birmingham STREAM: https://soundcloud.com/amyleon3/burning-in-birmingham Lyrics by Amy Leon Music by Chris Gaskell, Mike Haldeman, Seth Kaplan, Amy Leon, Jake Pinto, Dillon Treacy Recorded & Engineered by Alex Pyle Mastered by Lucas Hanson Directed by Tyler Rabinowitz - https://vimeo.com/tylerrabinowitz Cinematography by Oren Soffer - http://www.orensoffer.com/ Edited by Zach Terry: https://vimeo.com/user11967867 Colorist: Nick Metcalf at The Mill - http://www.themill.com/portfolio/filter/collection/86/nick-metcalf Choreography by Mark Travis Rivera - https://marktravisrivera.com/ Starring: Dominique Fishback Zuri Ford Anise S.

Amy spoke of the place black women have in society not as an emotional or moral burden, but as a token of their longanimity. Their skin is dark–but more importantly, it is thick. Racism exists, but still, so do they. Amy had been called a nigger three times in a week once; an experience she could never share with her mother. Her mother, white, Jewish, six-feet-tall, with blonde hair and blue eyes, would never experience someone rolling down their window and screaming that word at her before driving away. Their different exteriors created an internal divide. “I wrote this poem called Learning this Skin and it’s an analysis about how my mother will never be able to identify with me. At no point in her life will my mother walk down the street and be called nigger. And that’s my mother. That’s my blood. And she will never be able to identify with me as a black woman.”

I imagine this disconnect to be more of a venial offense, one that neither Amy nor her mother can help. Still, Amy’s relationship with her mother is complicated.

Amy grew up in the foster care system. She had lived in 13 different homes by the time she was 7 years old. Her mother would visit until she was 9, when she lost her visitation rights. Each visit, Amy’s mother searched her body for bruises, and subsequently pulled her out of homes with every discovery. “I had a lot of shit go down on me in my sleep. I’ve experienced every type of abuse there is,” Amy said. This abuse continued throughout Amy’s life, until she was 18 and matriculated at NYU.

At 13, she was adopted into an impoverished home by a 75 year old lady. There were other foster girls living there. Along with the girls were other inhabitants Amy described as “dangerous people.” These people abused the girls, a cycle many of them have been unable to escape.

“There’s a pattern of sexual abuse as if the world knows that that happened to you without you saying anything; it’s like an energy,” Amy said. “I’ve seen so many of the people I grew up with get taken advantage of and not know that they can change their minds or get taken out of these situations. For a lot of people, they can’t get out of these situations, because if you don’t have money and the person who is housing you and feeding you is also abusing you–then what are you expected to do? I’d rather be abused than be homeless sometimes. What’s worse? I don’t know.”

Amy did not tell anyone she was abused until the adoption was finalized. Despite feeling unsafe at home, Amy was going to school, she had friends, she planned to go to college–she didn’t want to risk these normalities for another home. “I lived with my abuser until I was 18. When I said something, [no one] believed me. He went to jail for touching another girl and then they let him out and let him stay in a home with foster children.”

And what of the social workers tasked to protect her and the other foster kids? “No one was checking in on us, nobody asking the right questions… I understand that keeping tabs on all of these foster kids in impoverished neighborhoods is difficult, but that's your job. They make these important jobs impossible to handle.”

Amy arranged to meet her mother once when she was at NYU to get baby pictures of herself. She had never seen pictures of herself as a baby before then. That same year, she received a Facebook message from a short Dominican man. The message read, “Soy tu padre.” That’s how Amy found out who her father was.

Download: https://amyleon.bandcamp.com/track/chasing Stream: https://soundcloud.com/amyleon3/chasing Written by Amy Leon Produced, Mixed & Mastered by Rahm Silverglade Starring: Amy León Ali Castro Nick Katen Kiah Victoria Max & Manu Video: Director - Matthew Puccini Director of Photography - Renee Mao Steadicam Operator - Jesse Rosenberg Camera Assistant - Alex Schaefer

Amy had God: “I’ve experienced a lot of things in my world and time, and just knowing that there’s more than me has been incredible. God to me is the moon and then sunrise and the sunset, that consistency. No matter what happens, the moon will be there. The sun will rise. And the sun will set. I can’t even rely on myself to be consistent in anything, so to be able to see that everyday is like, ‘Yo, God has to exist ‘cause who’s doing that? Who’s pressing rewind?’”

Amy had poetry: “When I was in the 10th grade, I joined an acting company called MCC, and their whole thing was writing about your life and making your life into art. My first performance piece ever was through it. It was my autobiography in 1 minute. Afterwards, adults came to me and said, ‘Thank you for saying things I don’t know how to tell my children.’  I remember that day like it was nothing. These two women came up to me, gave me a hug, and broke down in my arms. I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I am still going home to this abuse but you just broke down in my arms and I’ve never done that before.’”

With these two counterparts, Amy had reason to celebrate the human existence. In this celebration, she is unapologetic and unfiltered. She talks about her shit, hoping that more people will do the same. And if they do, then she believes there would be a lot less shit in the world.

“If we could be more honest about all of our emotions and not just talk about joy–joy is amazing and happiness is incredible–but every single emotion is equal. If we paid the same amount of attention to the moments that bring us despair as the moments that bring us joy, then we remember so much more. You know when someone’s not really smiling–it’s scary that we can see that in each other, but refuse to acknowledge it.”

Amy Leon performing "This" at Sofar London on February 11, 2015.

I sat across from Amy, stunned. Learning about her life made me unconsciously compare our narratives, wondering why the same God gave me my sheltered existence.

But, I knew what she meant–sensing sadness in others, surmising that something isn’t right, and choosing to ignore it. It always seemed easier that way.

I commented on this wisdom and bravery, referencing her past and alluding to her future–but before I could finish, she stopped me. “You’ve been through some shit, girl, it wasn’t the same, but you’ve been through some shit, too. I’ve been sad and you’ve been sad, we’ve both been sad. I don’t think there’s a range. And I don’t think I work harder than anybody, I think I am living my life and everybody else is living their lives. I try to emphasize to the kids I teach [at art workshops]: you are not your situation. Your situation does not need to define you. My environment didn’t stop me from living my life. The difference is just knowing that. Everyone can take the train from 110th street to 42nd street, everyone can do that. There are people I know who’ve never left the block, who’ve had four generations of their family in that one place; and while that’s amazing, I was just like: ‘When I was 16 I went to Paris and I found out that people look different, I wish you knew!’”

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Last year, Amy got sick. She told me about her chronic migraine disorder, how it causes her to pass out and have seizure-like and stroke-like symptoms every single day. She’d seen seven neurologists in the past year. None of them had any clue what was wrong with her, where her problems began and where they ended. She had performed with this condition, and managed to continue performing while having seizures on stage.

At one point, she had to quit: performing and teaching, for fear of passing out on stage or in front of her students. When she wasn’t performing, she’d go to her roof and watch the sunset. The consistency of the sun coming and going, clockwork in the sky, was her obsession, her piece of God.

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Amy had published two books when me met, and was about to start touring shortly after. She’d coordinated the tour entirely by herself, using Twitter to reach out to venues that follow other artists.

She’d been writing every day, for upcoming shows and a third book. She stressed that she doesn’t like submitting anything because she refuses to edit her work. “I will not edit my work. You are going to take it the way I want it. Absolutely not. I have no time. You can give me a suggestion, but I am not going to edit anything. A lot of people allow themselves to lose their spirit when things are edited, and I don’t do that.”

I asked her what exhausts her.

“The work. It’s really heavy. I feel everything so much. I become a sponge when good and bad things happen. It exhausts me but is also the most exciting part of my life. I want to speak to everyone after a show, but I need five minutes because I just threw up–literally–on stage.”

I couldn’t help but clarify. Do you really throw up?

“No. My experience on stage is a blackout experience. I don't really know what happens,” she said, before adding, “I feel so fortunate, I just started seeing words to music. You know synesthesia? Seeing colors? I did improv a few weeks ago and I felt like I was reading the air. I saw words in the air.”

January 4th @ Mercury Lounge NYC 100% Improvised piece. Audience word: Jubilee Jubilee: an anniversary of sorts To seek Jubilee: to hope one lives long enough to celebrate said jubilee Musicians: Alisha Roney Joey Ziegler Jake Pinto Chris Gaskill Seth Kaplan

Amy was flushed with excitement when we met. The prospect of acting in a production with words as profound and familiar as her own autobiographical work thrilled her. “If I die and no one has ever seen me anywhere in more than a 200 person venue, I don’t give a fuck, because it was permanent in your life. It was permanent in mine. That’s all I need. Thank you for letting me make things permanent for myself as an artist. You can’t tell me that I don’t exist if I am right here. And that’s why I need this part in this play! In it, there’s a character that keeps saying:

‘You should write this down. You should put it under a rock. Because when they find the piece of paper that you wrote it on, they can say it didn’t exist. But if you put it under a rock, they can’t say the rock didn’t exist. That’s nature.’”

Amy’s words, performances, and influence have an everlasting quality that bodies don’t. I realized that Amy’s reliance on the sun–its comings and goings–was a reflection of her. Amy was a beam of light. She fights the darkness of social inequality with honesty, faith, and love. Her egalitarian convictions are melodized in her performances. But she claims the base of her work is something else: “As artists, we are trying to recreate the colors of the sky changing–whether it’s in poetry, music, dance, or paint.”

Amy’s always looking up to the sky, her God, and reflecting it back down to us.

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Amy's album, Something Melancholy, will be available on November 15.  A release party for the album will take place at C'mon Everybody in Brooklyn the same day at 8pm. For more information about Amy and her work, check out her website.

Behind the Scenes: ​On-Going with Matilde Keizer

The journey began in Rome, Italy, home of Matilde Keizer.

Well, technically, the journey began – and will end – in New York City. That’s where Matilde Keizer and Trevor Silverstein met. And that’s where they sat down and plotted on a map all the places they planned to go when Matilde’s OPT student visa ended and she was kicked out of the country.

They didn’t start out thinking they were going to make a travel show. Initially, they planned to take a month and travel through Europe. Then, they decided to go to Asia. Then, they figured, “Why don’t we make something of this?” Career-wise, it made sense to them: turn this exile into an adventure; turn it into something big, something positive, something they can use for Matilde’s resume to make her a better applicant for the O-1 Artist Visa next year.

This was a creative opportunity for both of them: Trevor, in charge of filming and editing, and Matilde, starring as Matilde, the chatty, spirited adventurer whose clumsiness and unfiltered talking points separates this travel show from most others.

So, they left for Rome, which, again, is where the (on-camera) journey began.

All images provided by Trevor Silverstein.

Natalia: Where did you guys film On-Going?

Matilde: We started in Rome. Rome to Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, Penang), Malaysia to Indonesia (Bukit Lawang, Lombok), Indonesia to the Philippines (Palawan), the Philippines to Cambodia, Cambodia to Vietnam, Vietnam to Thailand, Thailand to Myanmar, Myanmar to India (Kolkata), and India to Berlin.

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Prior to the release of their first episode, Matilde and Trevor released two sneak peek videos. In the first video, they divided all of the places they were visiting into four different categories: Muslim, wet, cold, and hot; this is how Matilde packed in Rome. She stressed the importance of good footwear, wet wipes, scarves, and - most importantly for girls - learning to hover. “You want to make sure you have a good stance,” Matilde explained, as she squatted in front of the camera with a backpack strapped on, pretending to pee without sitting down. “If there isn’t toilet paper, the drip and dry method you know,” she advised. “Drip as much as you can, step away, done - no problem!”

Matilde dishes out advice on travel essentials and the art of "hovering." Stay tuned for more On-Going. Coming in Fall 2015.

In the second sneak peek released, Matilde went over the contents of her backpack. This included her insect repellent lotion, Ibuprofen, and “woman’s bag,” in which she put all of the things she didn’t necessarily need but still wanted to bring.

She went on to express slight panic at the possibility of her contracting Dengue fever, followed by uncomfortable chatter about her planned wardrobe in Muslim countries. Already, it was understood that traveling with Matilde may be a constant vacillation between reason and frenzy. “Always be prepared; have lots of medicine for your gut and digestive system; conditioner does not abide by the laws of gravity; and only be half-crazy when you have the option,” Matilde concluded the video.

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Natalia: Is there a storyline for the series?

Matilde: There is a storyline to each episode with definite arcs. It becomes stronger with each episode. We were developing our own voices over time. We went in with all of these ideas about comedy, travel, and sarcasm and as we went along, we had to be very natural about the way things come up. Each episode has a different tone because of that.

Natalia: What research did you guys do before setting out to each place?

Trevor: We did a lot of research, both in the time leading up to the trip and then just as much research as we went along. Most of it entailed having an understanding of the route we would take over the course of two and half months, which was complicated to figure out sometimes; the actual route we took changed a handful of times based on flight costs and what-not. We got most of our ideas of where we wanted to go as we looked into other places. We'd see pictures of a temple or read about a street food stall and say we have to go there.

Natalia: And did you do any research in terms of packing?

Trevor: Packing was kind of just considering the tropical climate and what else we might think we need. We also packed less at the start, fully aware that we'd want to pick up souvenirs along the way. And luckily, the amount of film equipment I had was so minimal it all fit into a small case that fit into my small backpack. I’m happy that the filming looks decent enough because we only used a GoPro. And I am happy that’s all we used because if I had to carry around a camera that was in any way expensive it would have made the trip miserable for both of us. One: it would have been heavy, and two: it would have gotten people’s attention. The GoPro is great because everyone has one and carries it around everywhere, so you blend in. There are times where I would be filming Matilde and no one thought anything of it and everyone acted fairly normal. The only time people gave us odd looks is when we pulled out our microphone. And three: cameras are expensive, so I would have been constantly paranoid about it.

Trevor carried the camera equipment around everywhere throughout the trip, which was ideal as nothing was scripted and they could film instinctively. This flexibility facilitated the capturing of raw, vulnerable footage. Matilde and Trevor were very clear about the honest tone they wanted the series to have. This was apparent to me immediately, as I watched Matilde sit in a beautiful mosque and discuss the explosive diarrhea she was about to have. “I feel that mutton in my button fighting to get out,” she joked, somewhat achingly. “I only nearly vomited twice,” she noted in another episode, after getting off a flight. It’s somewhat jarring to find such casually crude and straightforward dialogue in regards to travel and vacations. People share the beautiful sunsets, tans, and beaches. No one admits to the relentless bathroom trips after eating questionable meat from the local marketplace.

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Natalia: I like the openness in Matilde’s character in the series. She is very relatable and uncensored. That’s unique to find in our increasingly filtered society.

Trevor: When you look at travel content on the Internet, you see all of these perfectly edited videos with pop songs and electronic music, and it’s this highly curated version of a place. We don’t have the equipment to do that and it would look really silly if we even tried.

Matilde: When people think of Indonesia they think of Bali and these beautiful beaches, but it is actually quite dirty. The water is dirty and there is trash all over the beach and there are all of these fires that are creating pollution. We went to a beach in Lombok that was really beautiful, and traditionally you would expect people to be like, “Oh my God, look at the amazing water!” But actually, it’s ignoring the reality that this country is in huge environmental struggle.

Trevor: People on Instagram post a picture of the perfect beach and people love it and they go crazy over it. But to find that beach isn’t easy. People can go an entire trip in that area without finding that perfect thing that everyone seems to post all the time.

Natalia: I really like that angle. Especially on Instagram, users make traveling seem very glamorous. It makes everyone want to leave where they are and go somewhere else. And here you guys are showing people that no, it’s actually really crowded, and the food isn’t as sanitary...

Matilde: But we also want to make sure to tell people: “Look, you can travel, you can go to all these places, but remember that the world is a highly complex place in which you’re not going to be able to get that perfect shot, but you can do all of these things and you can experience all these places and it’s easy and it’s not that expensive.” We want to be able to show that and to share the truth about what we’ve experienced.

Natalia: That seems like the essence of this travelogue: truthfulness.

Matilde: There is no pre-decided thing depicted; this is a product of experiencing things for what they are.

Natalia: Yeah, and the music and color schemes complement the tone very well. How did you decide on these elements?

Trevor: So the music in the series is personally one of my favorite parts. Everything you hear that wasn't recorded on location is from a Swedish company called Epidemic Sound. They source really high quality royalty free music and sound effects from independent artists/producers and then offer them on flexible licensing plans to creators. When I discovered the huge database of content on their site, I knew I needed them and luckily they were extremely accommodating and flexible to our low budget. Getting a license with them has been one of the most crucial aspects to editing the show. As for picking the music for each moment, we tend to gravitate towards sounds that have a slight sense of humor to them, but usually choose something that is tonally similar to what you're seeing on screen. For the color scheme, that was something that came about very early on when we first started planning the series. We came up with our very simple logo and the colors were picked after some trial and error. Something about the light pink and light yellow combo struck us and we decided to stick with it.

Natalia: That all worked out really well. Was there anything else in the filming process that ended up falling into place as seamlessly? Any moments you happened to capture at the right time?

Trevor: Actually, yeah. We were on a bus in Cambodia - a night bus - and it broke down. And even though Matilde was not in a good mood, I decided to film it anyway.

Matilde: I was not having it at all.

Trevor: It was also a really bizarre circumstance because the bus didn’t break down on the side of a highway, but in the middle of nowhere and right next to a small village where people were awake and husking rice.

Natalia: What time was this at?

Matilde: 1 AM.

Trevor: The bus didn’t leave again until after sunrise. We stayed for, like, four hours.

Matilde: And then it broke down again at the scariest rest stop I’ve ever seen. It was a square cement structure with kids running around in the mud.

Trevor: Night buses can be a risky venture. They are definitely one of the more popular ways to get around in Southeast Asia when you are in the mainland portion, like Vietnam or Thailand, but being on a bus in the middle of the night being driven by somewhat reckless drivers –

Matilde: All of the bus drivers were drunk and drove incredibly fast –

Trevor: It’s a long, long story but it was not good.

Natalia: Will we be seeing this in any of the upcoming episodes?

Trevor: No, not that. If we were ever in a situation where I was concerned for Matilde’s or my safety, I avoided filming.

Natalia: What were the different cultures that you saw? I am curious to hear about any of the poverty and feminist issues around that area.

Matilde: In India, there was one point where Trevor was walking and two little kids attached themselves to us and were grabbing inside his pockets. It wasn’t funny or cute; it was harassment.

Trevor: We tried to keep walking and for about three blocks they kept this up until finally an older bystander saw what was going on and told the kids to stop.

Matilde: Also, to me, one of the harder moments of poverty was walking by a very run down children's hospital in Phnom Penh at midnight with a long line of mothers holding their babies trying to get in, even though in my eyes that hospital was a scary place to have to bring your child. But of course there are very different levels of poverty in the whole region that we are otherwise blind to in the west.

Natalia: So, as white tourists, or you, Matilde, as a woman – were you treated differently anywhere?

Matilde: Well, people gawked at us everywhere because we were clear outsiders: bigger and white.

Trevor: Yeah, but the attention was always more on Matilde.

Natalia: I find that interesting. I feel like women in New York are accustomed to being cat called or gawked at, but I, personally, never experience that when I’m walking with someone else, especially not a guy. So I am surprised to hear you experienced that with Trevor by your side.

Matilde: In Kolkata, the way men stare at you and talk to you makes you wish for New York catcalling. Genuinely gets to the point that you feel naked from the way they undressed you on the street. I also felt that way a little bit in Indonesia. The roles of women in the region are very different from the way we experience life in the west, however in Thailand and Myanmar it seemed to me that women were working on similar levels as men.

Natalia: Did the language barrier make these situations worse? Or any situations, for that matter.

Matilde: It was really frustrating. I tried to learn “hello” and “thank you” for every place we traveled, but in Cambodia, for instance, even when we were saying things right, we were saying them wrong because we don’t have the same melody in our voices.

Trevor: But, at the end of the day, everyone really does speak English, and even if you couldn’t communicate, you found a way with gestures, tone, and body language.

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Now, done filming and settled in Berlin for the unforeseeable future, Trevor and Matilde have new objectives in mind: editing and sharing the ten episodes of the season.

Natalia: What are the goals from here?

Trevor: First and foremost is to finish all ten episodes. Then, to get people to watch it. I’m still learning more about marketing and spending way more time than ever on Twitter and Facebook than I ever had in my life. The tough part about marketing is that you have to be doing it all of the time and I am focusing on editing right now. We are both new to this; Matilde has marketing experience, but –

Matilde: Yeah, from a non-profit film organization, so very different from this. But what’s our next move in terms of marketing is reaching out to press that might be interested in us and applying for festivals.

Trevor: We got accepted into one festival in Rome called “Roma Cinemadoc.”

Natalia: That’s great! Congratulations. With the filming and traveling done for the time being, were there any new perspectives about life you guys picked up along the way?

Matilde: A huge takeaway is to take an easier approach to life. To not take things in such a negative way. There is a joy in the way that people in Southeast Asia approach life that I took with me.

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Watch and subscribe to On-Going with Matilde Keizer on Vimeo.

Meera Lee Patel: “Creativity comes from curiosity”

We met at The Blue Stove off of the Graham Avenue stop in Brooklyn. It was only us at the coffee shop for the most part, but the intrusive sounds of coffee grinding in the kitchen forced us to switch seats after about thirty seconds in conversation. The meeting had been rescheduled a few times before due to Meera’s busy schedule, and I knew going into it that she would be pressed for time when meeting with me. And yet, I was five minutes late, as usual. Meera was unfazed. Immediately, I was struck by her aura of kindness. Somehow, within the first few moments of meeting her, I already felt like we were best friends. 

Something unmistakable when meeting Meera is that she embodies her art: colorful, delicate, welcoming. I was reminded of the warm, pastel colors of her work while in her company. Her paintings embody her; she embodies them. It’s symbiotic. I can hear the phrases and quotes she pairs with her doodles in her honeyed voice. The thoughtfulness and precision of her word choice when speaking is replicated in her careful selection of what to write with certain images.

She speaks from the heart and works from the heart. Perhaps that's why her favorite emoji is the sparkle; she even texts from the heart. 

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Natalia: I did a lot of research on you before meeting.

Meera: Oh, yeah, there’s too much about me on the Internet.

Natalia: I saw that you went to Rutgers. What did you study there?

Meera: I studied English and Journalism.

Natalia: Cool. And then you started working on art more consistently after graduating?

Meera: I got a job in technical publishing and after about a year I knew I couldn’t be happy just doing what I was doing. So, I started drawing as a way to feel good about myself at some point in my week. I ended up creating an Etsy shop and joining the craft fair circuit and I saw there were a lot of people doing this for a living. So I thought, “If they’re doing it, why can’t I do it?” And that’s when it became a very real dream and since then I’ve been working on making it happen.

Natalia: Yeah, so tell me everything - when did you decide to quit your job?

Meera: I still have a job actually.

Natalia: No wonder you’re so busy! Are you still at the same place?

Meera: Yeah.

Natalia: How do you balance that?

Meera: I don’t know. I don’t, I mean, people ask me this all the time and I don’t know what to say because I feel overwhelmed consistently and stressed all the time. I guess I have the same fear that everyone has about making the leap, which is: I don’t want to do it at the wrong time and I don’t want to have a Plan B. I want to be smart about it and do something that’s good for me, because I’ve been balancing both for such a long time that I don’t want to take the leap and regret it.

Natalia: Do you think, financially, you’d be fine living off of your artwork, or do you need to be working your day job right now?

Meera: I don’t think I need to be doing anything. Sometimes I feel really conflicted about how I can do it all - so why not? Which is probably not healthy.

Natalia: Also, it’d probably stress you out if you didn’t do it all. Right? For me, I don’t like saying no to opportunities ever. I would rather give up sleep and my sanity to make it work.

Meera: Exactly.

Natalia: How do you spend your time on the weekend when you aren’t on the clock?

Meera: I used to be really adamant about working on the weekend all the time. I was like, “I need to do it. I need to do it. It’s the only way I’ll be able to go full-time.” After a few years of doing that, I felt really burnt out and my social life had taken a major hit. And, I wasn’t happy. I’m happy when I am making art but one thing cannot fulfill the other; it has to be a balancing act. In the last year, I’ve been making adjustments and making other things a priority. I think it’s frustrating because my journey is going slower, but it’s a lot healthier and I am a lot happier, so I think it is a nice trade-off. If I go more than two days without making art, it doesn’t feel good in a different personal way, so I just listen to myself and what I need.

Natalia: How long do certain pieces take? Does it depend on the size, I guess?

Meera: No. Depends on the content. A sketchbook piece might take 2-3 hours, and that’s just something I do for me - it’s not going to a client or in my portfolio, but I still want it to look a certain way. Client work can take, I don’t know, 20 hours sometimes. It’s not consistent, which is probably not good, but I spend whatever time it takes.

Natalia: I think it’s pretty cool that you dedicate time to pieces that no one else will see.

Meera: I mean, the sketchbook pieces are the most meaningful work I make right now - besides from book work. I am currently working on two new book proposals. Those are meaningful and for other people, too, which I love. The sketchbook pieces are just for me with obscure thoughts that I find beauty in. 

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I had the chance to look at Meera’s books prior to meeting. There’s a total of four books, all published between April 2014 and August 2015. Good for One Mediocre Shoulder Rub: Considerate Coupons for Couples is a collection of coupons for couples to gift each other, such as “one evening of complete control of the remote.” You're Cute: Cards to Break the Ice is a compilation of what I consider to be pickup lines, but Barnes and Noble describes as “dating cards designed to cleverly capture the attention of someone new.” Either way, they’re cute and funny and probably helped a lot of people break the ice. Daily Zen spans over a year and encourages drawing doodles in order to gain inner peace. It’s filled with inspiring quotes and illustrations by Meera. In similar vein, Meera’s most recent book, Start Where You Are: A Journal for Self-Exploration, is a self-help journal that also includes enlightening quotes and pictorial prompts.

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Natalia: I saw that you’ve published books, most recently: Daily Zen and Start Where You Are. What was the process behind working on these and getting them published?

Meera: I was approached by the publishing company for Daily Zen after doing some smaller projects for them beforehand (Good for One Mediocre Shoulder Rub: Considerate Coupons for Couples and You're Cute: Cards to Break the Ice). They had the idea for the concept of the book and thought that I would be a good person to do it. It’s a daily journal with 365 drawing prompts and quotes on mindfulness. That was fun to do. It was fun to read so much literature to pick out what I thought would be beneficial for so many people.

Natalia: And then what about Start Where You Are?

Meera: Start Where You Are was my conception, and my idea, and my proposal. I wrote it and illustrated it. It feels like my kid.

Natalia: And you said you are working on two new book proposals?

Meera: Yes, so I haven’t sent them yet so I don’t know how much I can talk about them, but one is a children’s book and the other one is going to be another self-help nonfiction book for adults based on fear.

Natalia: A children’s book would be a new extension of work for you, right? What inspired that?

Meera: The children’s book proposal is inspired by my nephew because he’s a technology-freak and he isn’t even three, which scares me. So I’m working on a book that will be just as engaging, interesting, and interactive for him without being a sparkle of an iPad.

Natalia: Yeah, I see kids everywhere with their faces glued to screens and they all seem to have their own iPhones and iPads. Meanwhile, I just got an iPad and I think I use it once a week to watch Netflix in the background as I work. Technology has definitely come a long way since when we were younger.

Meera: For myself, I feel like it’s negatively influenced me in terms of comprehension, because I read so much stuff on the Internet now. And I feel like I don’t absorb it as well and I read things in a quantitative fashion as opposed to a qualitative fashion now. I used to read so many more books than I do now and I used to be able to recite them and tell you what was going on, and now I’ve lost that.

Natalia: Well, the nice thing about what you do is that it is so separate from technology.

Meera: That’s why I insist on working with paint. I got the iPad so I could do some stuff digitally, but I only used it once or twice because I don’t want to be on the computer - I want to paint. There are some things I’ve changed because of timing and efficiency, but I don’t think I am going to ever stop being a mostly traditional artist. 

Natalia: What about those shoes that you designed through Bucketfeet? I think it’s pretty cool that you are basically a shoe designer. Tell me about those.

Meera: So Bucketfeet... I’ve done two pairs for them - one is very simple, it’s just a bunch of brightly colored petals and then they just released my map shoes. They just came out a few weeks ago and I am so happy, they totally sold out. I’m actually doing an event with them at Facebook’s office painting custom shoes and talking about my work.

Natalia: So do people purchase the shoes and then you paint them?

Meera: I’ve done custom shoes for Bucketfeet before so I do a few designs that I think will work and then people will say “I love these” and I’ll recreate them. So every pair is a one-off.

Natalia: I can’t say this enough - you are really busy. You even teach an art class, right?

Meera: Right, through Brit & Co. They reached out to me in September of last year and I flew out to San Francisco in December to film the class. That was really scary for me.

Natalia: Really, why?

Meera: I feel very shy in general and everyone who meets me says I’m not but it’s taken me a while to be able to sit down, like with you, and open up and not feel self-conscious about it. My natural default stage is like a hermit. I like being alone and in my space. Some people like being surrounded by people all the time and that’s how they communicate, but I find that I communicate best through my work. That’s how I express myself best.

Natalia: Where do you get your inspiration? Any of the experiences in your life?

Meera: All of the experiences in my life. All of the people I meet. My friends and family, a lot. I try to make work that I think is meaningful and would help somebody else feel something. And I feel like the only way I can make that work is by feeling something myself. I like to make work that shows people that we are all the same and that we are all different and that there is something important inside of everyone, and that we should look for that.

Natalia: Your sister is a writer. Are your parents artistic at all?

Meera: My mom is super creative. She is a social worker. But she is a very good seamstress, knitter, crocheter, and she does embroidery. She’s always encouraged me. My dad isn’t artistic, but he is creative in so many other ways. He is very compassionate and empathetic. I think that has influenced a lot of my work, who I am, and who I am trying to become.

Natalia: I like how you described your dad as creative, but not artistically. How would you define “creativity”?

Meera: I think creativity comes from curiosity and the ability to see outside the way you thought things were. I think it can be applicable to any situation and any type of person. I think it’s such a worshipped trait in our world today and - not that I feel it shouldn’t be - but I don’t think it’s that rare. I think that everybody has it. Everybody has everything, right? You just have to cultivate it and nourish it if you want to. I don’t think creativity is something I’ve earned; everybody has it. I think what holds people back from being creative is fear and the inability to see past themselves. My dad is totally creative, he just doesn’t express it in the same way I express it.

Natalia: Is there anyone you’ve been reunited with through your work? Anyone from high school or another part of your past?

Meera: That’s a fun question. Yeah, tons of people. Tons of people from high school have reached out to tell me that they think it’s great what I’m doing or they love my work; or some people have reached out and said, “hey, I really like the person you’ve become and I want to be friends and catch up.” So, I’ve had a few friendships rekindled and it’s really sweet and it’s cool to see who people have grown up to be. And usually they’ve grown up to be somebody great. I think I feel strange in a lot of ways that my work is so exposed on the Internet. Sometimes I feel more uncomfortable when friends that I grew up with but are no longer in my life or family members I am not close to are looking at it. I feel more awkward about those people than people I’ve never met. I think that fear comes from being judged; like, this person knew me when I was 8, or 15, or 25 and what do they think about me now? I think it’s ok to feel those things as long as I don’t let it stop me from making my work. I think about it sometimes and I feel it sometimes, but as long as I don’t let it stop me, I’m ok with it.

Natalia: I feel like political correctness is essential for people in the spotlight now. I get the sense that a lot of people censor their feelings. Has that ever affected your work?

Meera: I had an internship in January with Today in Tabs, which is a liberal daily newsletter that is politically driven. I drew a comic everyday based on the news and at first I felt uncomfortable because I was all of a sudden taking a stance on things. I was letting people know my opinion on feminism or abortion or the presidential candidates. I mean, in general it’s hard to be offended by my work. It’s very feminine, affectionate, and open. The worst anybody could say is that it’s really cheesy or stupid. With these comics, I had a position and it was evident. Initially, I felt that I worked so hard to have an aesthetic and an identity with my work, and am I throwing that off? But, I got over it because I am a multi-faceted person and the ideas I express through comics are another part of me and I think they are just as important as the open and accepting and empathetic part of me. 

Natalia: As you and your opinion and perspectives mature, does your artwork mature with you? Are you able to see an evolution in your work aligning to your life?

Meera: Yes, when I was in high school, like 15 or 16, I made some dark, depressing, weird stuff. It was a lot of themes about death and hurt and pain. Those things interest me less now, which is why I don’t focus on them. I think life is really interesting; I think having the ability to feel so many emotions and not become ruined by them is interesting; I think realizing the importance of being able to feel the whole spectrum of an emotion is interesting. So I try to focus on that. I don’t think I only make happy work, but I don’t think I made destructive work. I went through some things that I thought were difficult for me, but I learned from them and I grew from them, and I made changes within myself from them. People have patterns, right? Everybody has patterns. And people will have the same experience over and over again, and I think the worst thing you can do is not learn from them. Most importantly, I’ve learned how to respond instead of react. I used to be angsty and resentful and I closed down a lot; now, whenever I want to close down, I stay open.

Natalia: Some people consider art to be lonely; how do you feel about that?

Meera: Yeah, I think art can be lonely. I think I learned that when I worked so much that I got burnt out and wasn’t paying attention to anything going on. Making art can be isolating; it depends on the type of art. What I do is very solitary and fleeting. It doesn’t feel good all of the time. I think that’s the trade-off. I think that life is pretty lonely, so I don’t know if art specifically is lonely, but I guess it’s one of the parts of my life where I face it the most. Some people face it at their work, or in their relationship, or at school - so I think loneliness is something that shows itself over and over again in different ways. On the flipside of art being lonely, is that it’s not. It’s connected me with so many people that I’ve never met and am never going to meet. I get emails from people all around the world and I’ll never get sick of people telling me that a piece that I made is helping them through a tough period of their life or makes them feel good. So that is very not lonely.

Natalia: Do you consistently set your personal bar higher every time you reach a goal, or do you feel satisfied with everything you’ve done?

Meera: There’s so much more that I want to do. I think it is easy to lose perspective and forget all of the things you’ve already done. I can be better at maintaining a better sense of perspective. It’s very easy for me to think, “I haven’t done anything,” or “this could be better,” or “this is taking too long.” If you ask me flat-out, most of the time I’ll tell you I’ve done nothing. Not because I don’t feel fulfilled - because I do - but it’s because I want to do so many things. And I want to say so many things with my work. I wonder if that ever goes away? I feel like everybody I know wants to do so much, so I don’t know if it goes away. There are a lot of different facets of illustration that I haven’t even touched yet. I want to do huge murals. I want to make street art. I want to write a novel. I want to write poems. I want to do paper products. And, you know, more than I’ve done. I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling that way, because that’s why I make stuff. I don’t think that’s going to go away. 

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You can find more about Meera’s work on her website, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

You can purchase her work on Etsy and books on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Art Collision: Kaela Garvin & Julia Pugachevsky

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Transcript:

MD: Welcome to Episode 2 (who knew we’d make it this far?!) of Art Collision. I am your host Michael Doshier a.k.a. Johnny Darlin in musical land. And in this episode of Art Collision, I sit down with Julia Pugachevsky, creator of the web series "Life After Fat," and Kaela Garvin, co-creator of the web-series "2 Girls 1 Asian." Julia and Kaela are both friends of mine from college, but their creation and release of these series’ came as a shock to me as a friend and fan. Somehow, despite just graduating school and carrying demanding day jobs and pursuing other artistic endeavors that I did know about, these two friends of mine were suddenly releasing these seemingly massive, highly collaborative, sleek-as-hell projects that I’ve always been deeply intrigued with. Where did they find the time and the funding and the casts and the inspiration? How personal were these projects to each of them, and what were the themes they were trying to explore? I couldn’t wait to find out the answers to these questions, but even more importantly, to see what happened when placing two strangers in a room together who had undergone similar processes to deliver very different, yet equally stunning, results. With, of course, some free-flowing Blue Moon, as always.

This is Art Collision: Kaela Garvin in Conversation with Julia Pugachevsky.

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MD: Today I am here with Kaela Garvin of “2 Girls 1 Asian” and Julia Pugachevsky of “Life After Fat.” Thank you both very much for joining me today. In both of your series, you’re very much exploring the idea of identity. That’s evident from just the title of either of them. I’m curious why you chose that particular identity to explore and where that came from in your psyches and minds.

JP: For me, “Life After Fat” came from – I haven’t personally lost a lot of weight, but I’ve had friends who have, and who had sort of similar experiences where it’s sort of… adjusting to this new body, and feeling like there’s this definitive “new you”, which I strongly disagree with. I think as a society we teach women especially (but men as well) that once you transform into a new person, your life will be so much better and work out. That’s sort of the core of the show – exploring that aspect of it, and finding out who you really are in this way that isn’t being perfect all the time, or being thinner or having better skin or whatever it is. It’s a matter of finding that original person in all their new forms and tying them together.

KG: That was something I really liked about your series – and it was so subtle and cool – was that, it’s not just people who are overweight or underweight or going through weight change that face body image issues. It’s everybody. You see that in all the characters in their relationships, so I thought that was really subtle and cool. We chose to focus on racial identity because me and my friend Kelly who created it, it’s something we always talk about. We’re both half-Asian and we’re usually the two People of Color in the room – if not the only ones, there may be someone else of a different race. But we are usually the only Asian people in the room. So there are a lot of micro-aggressions that go on all the time. There’s this persistent American idea that being Asian is “other” and “foreign” no matter how long you’ve been in the country. There’s also all these other crazy things that men say to Asian women online, in-person, on the street. The other day in Chelsea, there was this guy just yelling “Ni hao” at me for forever. Twice in one day! I walked past him two times and maybe he was yelling “Ni hao” at everybody, but I don’t think so! So, yeah, for us it was the obvious thing that if we’re creating avatars of ourselves going through the world, something that we connect to as friends and artists when we’re working in a room as diverse as they get, race is a thing that comes up a lot for us. So we took that and ran with it, and took it up to 100 in the series, but it was something that was real in our lives.

Julia Pugachevsky.

MD: Both shows are based in New York City – you both live in New York City and they feel like New York shows. What does that backdrop add to the show?

JP: When I started “Life After Fat,” I was around 21 so I was super into Girls. I still am; I still watch it with a more critical eye now (especially when it comes to race and inclusivity, although I think Lena Dunham has grown a lot as an artist) but when I first saw it, I was so amazed. I think because I had never seen someone who looks like Lena Dunham portrayed in a sexual way. Or, a way that’s earnest and not the punch line of a joke. And I just love the style of it – they had these friendships that were not always perfect and even catty sometimes, which I think can happen in your 20s. The people you think are your friends are perhaps your friends for the wrong reason. There was something about the grittiness of it I loved and I found kind of real at that time. During the first season of “Life After Fat,” that’s definitely true where there’s a little bit of jealousy and cattiness and everyone’s struggling to find a job. Coming out of college, in addition to any weight transformations or personal changes, you also have the change of not being supported by your parents anymore and having to make a name for yourself, having to make a life for yourself. All of that combined, being 20 in New York is maddening; it really is. It’s a struggle.

KG: Both of our series look at being a woman in New York City, going through daily life, interacting with this crazy huge metropolis which is the best place in the world but at times super “other” and scary and isolating. For us at least, it was an obvious choice – we met here, we live here. The filming it, perhaps, in one of our hometowns (Kelly is from Maryland, I’m the from San Francisco Bay Area) – we’re both from total suburbia. So the situations we find ourselves in may even be more aggravated because they’re less frequent. I think here, there’s a fast-paced thing that makes every event seem both more significant and less, depending on how your day’s been.

JP: That’s very real. I also like that you gave that nod to Hannah Horvath in your pilot. That was so good, and I was thinking the same thing. It reminds me of the opening scene of Girls where the parents are like, “We’re actually cutting you off.” It reminded me of both Girls and Broad City – in Broad City, you have them both skyping each other, and you’re both having these Skype conversations with your parents at the same time. It’s like, surreal and hilarious but also feels so, so real at the same time. Your friends are just with you in these very strange times.

KG: With our real parents messing up their lines!

MD: That was one of my questions! Those were your real parents?

KG: Yeah, we did it before Aziz! (laughs) No, we skyped both of our parents in their houses in Maryland and California to film that scene and my dad was reading a paper and you can see it! You can see that he’s doing it. And one of my friends messaged me and was like, “So your dad hasn’t memorized, huh?” Sorry!

Kaela Garvin.

MD: Dad was not off-book. Do your parents watch the whole series?

KG: They did! Actually in the mid-season, it starts with an episode where we have period shits and we’re in the bathroom and Kelly’s farting a lot. My dad, when I went home for Christmas, he was really mad. He was like, “We only watched two minutes then we turned it off. You should really think before making material like that.” But then he was like, “Yeah, well, I don’t know, it’d be easier for me to swallow if it was like a dude doing it.” And I was like, “That’s why we’re doing it!”

JP: I so agree with that too. In the pilot of “Life After Fat” there was a joke that people always comment on. One of the girls talks about sneezing and her tampon falling out. I don’t know, it’s something that I’m so excited about when I see female web series creators, because I think that’s something we need to tackle. You know, like, why is it only in Judd Apatow movies you have guys doing gross stuff or being weird? I feel like Broad City is something that I’m very, very excited about for that reason too. Women being kind of like the guys, cause we are. There’s no rule that we can’t be this way. I think showing that vulnerability, both series’ have that in common where you’re showing women being themselves and fucking up and it’s okay and it can be cute, even.

MD: I wanted to talk about my favorite episode of each one. I’ll start with you, Julia. My favorite episode was “Brunch” largely because of the interaction between Lauren and Ellen. To me, it speaks to the existential dread most artists – at least myself – have which is worry that I’m not doing enough. In that scene, she was literally told she wasn’t doing enough. It was poignant and hard to watch, and weirdly inspiring because you could tell she was going to go out and do more.

JP: Yeah, originally Ellen was supposed to be Russian, like an Olga or something. My parents are from the Former Soviet Union. I used to take music classes at this Russian Music Academy. There’s such a difference and it can be a lot harsher. I think having parents that are Ukrainian and not American – they would always criticize other parents of my American friends, like, “What is it with this country where we tell everyone they’re good all the time. That’s sick, that’s bad.” It’s weird; I sort of grew up in between that, being a kid of immigrants. It’s always like, “if you want to do something artistic,” and my parents have always been supportive of that, but they’d say, “You have to work for it. We won’t support you if you’re going to drink and fuck around and say you’re an artist.” So, I think that’s the message with that. Lauren is someone who wants to be an actor as so many people do, but her perception of what is trying hard is not actually trying hard. This woman, she’s older and more experienced, looks at her like, “You have everything. You have all this privilege, this time, this money to actually put into something. Why aren’t you doing every tiny thing that you can when you’ve been given so much?”

MD: My favorite episode of “2 Girls 1 Asian” was the Super Musical Episode.

KG: We sort of came up with the idea while driving around in her car when she had a car in the city. She’s now in grad school back at home in Maryland, but we’d drive around and toss around ideas, which is where we came up with the whole season. We were super excited about the musical episode. For the first season, I’d churn out a draft based on an outline Kelly would give me and then we’d outline what each scene might look like. Then I’d go back and write it and she’d give me notes and we’d go back and forth and then our director and D.P. Dorian and Tyler would give us notes and rewrites. So it was very a collaborative process. The first draft of the script, though, the lyrics were not that super different. Then we realized if you want to use that music, it has to be a parody legally. So I went back and really hacked at the songs and most of those lyrics stayed which is what you hear. Then we brought on board a couple of great musicians – one is Lance Jabr, who I went to High School with. He’s back in the Bay Area now but at the time he was at NYU for grad school. And a guy I went to class with, John Franco, who is an amazing pianist. So we recorded it all in one of the actress’s apartments, actually, cause she at the time had a sound studio set up. So it was a lot of moving parts, but I loved recording it, I loved doing all the music, and Kelly and I both come from a Musical Theatre background so it was fun to be total dorks about that. It was a lot of fun to shoot, but it definitely sucked up the most budget and time out of any episode because we had to do so much for it.

MD: I want to talk about the ending of each season one of your series, how I interpreted it, allow you to expand on that or correct me if I’m wrong, and talk about the future of what these characters are going to go through in the upcoming seasons, as much as you want to say about that. I’ll start with you, Julia, the last scene of “Life After Fat” read to me as this amazing moment where our protagonist made a decision to change her life in a radical way. In her decision to approach this group of artists that inspire and challenge her and leave this guy behind that she is hanging out with – which is not something she had done at that point, she seemed very apt to hook up or date whoever made themselves available to her. It seems like her friendship drama with her roommate is out of her mind at this point and she’s committed to going to something new in her life.

JP: She’s sort of this character that has this new body but doesn’t feel attached to it yet. Partially because she never felt people liked her or accepted her for who she was before this change. She’s bouncing from guy to guy – you never know if the sex is good for her. She hooks up and does these things because she feels like they’ll validate her in some way. Regardless of if you have this backstory or not, I feel like that’s something a lot of women – myself included – go through. I’d say the early years of my 20’s were like, getting drunk and hooking up and pretending to have this emotional barrier of “I don’t care! It’s fine!” And pretending to always be the chill girl. Her exterior is that she’s not very emotional unless she’s pushed. Her brother sort of pushes her a lot and that’s the first time you see her break, really. She’s almost like, disturbingly calm. You can see it drives her friends crazy and they all worry about her. So I think this is a chance of her – seeing this beautiful thing, this Burlesque dancer, and deciding to take this chance and try it. It’s showing more vulnerability, it’s healthier, and it’s something that could promote actual self-love, which is something I want to explore. In season 2, not to spoil too much, it’ll be the first time she actually falls in love with someone and I think that will be something where she’s really exploring these emotions for the first time and allowing herself to be vulnerable in this very, very real way. That’s sort of where I want to see her character grow and really challenge her. It’s easy to be this, I don’t know, sort of like you’re floating above your body the whole time and not really interacting or reacting to things.

MD: That’s beautiful. (laughs) I was just really moved by that! I feel the need to take a risk in my life and totally shake things up! And then, for you, Kaela, I felt that the ending of “2 Girls 1 Asian” was kind of the opposite, but just as inspiring and moving. For me, it read that they had this moment where they could radically change their lives by taking a break from their friendship, but instead the moment they decide to give that a shot, they realize they are each other’s partners.

KG: We actually rewrote most of the last episode. We shot it all in a car on the road in Sleepy Hollow, New York. We scouted out the location the night before. We were like, “Eh, this script isn’t doing it for me,” so as we were talking we started to improve a scene until we thought we had it right for the end. It was always going to be that ending, though, of them trying to walk into the wilderness with their dead car by the side of the road. But looking forward, we did three more episodes as a mid-season that aren’t tied down to any storyline. They’re basically back in Brooklyn up to their normal antics. Friends are really your lifeline, especially in New York City, so in season 2 we’re trying to figure out some of our ideas, especially now that we’re physically separated. Our series has always been ludicrously autobiographical – we’ll take what’s going on in our real lives and totally explode that into something we think is funny, I don’t know if it’s actually funny, it’s funny-ish. But we’re hoping to look into what happens – and this was an idea pitched to us in a writer’s room for the midseries – what if one of the girls goes to grad school? How do they deal with each other gaining success without the other one? Maybe not even without, but separate. And that’s something that actually happened in our real lives, and I think we’re interested in looking into that and what that means for the fictional Kaela and Kelly.

JP: Something I love about your series and am almost jealous of in a way is that they have this beautiful friendship and it’s a love story. It’s platonic, but I think you’re seeing them overcome these things together and they have conflicts within that friendship, but you can’t see one without the other. I think seeing one person succeed, especially with acting where it’s so…it can be so raw, all the emotions of pursuing an artistic career in general. Seeing one friend succeed without the other is hard, because success is so rare in general. I don’t know. I’m so moved by the friendship and I love shows where there are two women where they are so close, nice, and real with each other. They have a real genuine friendship.

KG: I think that’s why it’s so cool to see so many lady web series popping up. Institutionally, there’s not funding for women’s’ projects. I feel that in this independent arts community is where women get to shine because nobody’s giving us money.

JP: Or a chance. Women are half the population if not more, in this country at least. TV and playwriting have more space for women, but even playwriting, on Broadway you see a bunch of old white guy stuff rehashed a lot. With TV, you have Amy Schumer, you have Samantha B, you have Broad City, and you have Shonda Rhimes. You have all these women in power doing these cool things and it becomes this thing where webseries’ are getting picked up. If you are good enough, they will notice you. And I don’t feel the same way about Hollywood. And I think even where I work – I work at Buzzfeed – I love that we have so many strong women and I’m allowed to do stuff that’s content for women. I think the Internet web series realm is a really great place for female creators to thrive. For female filmmakers or aspiring filmmakers and writers – make something, put it on there, and be so good that they can’t not notice you.

KG: I think in general, artists, self-production is the way to go. It’s great that the Internet is around to publicize it. But it’s such a weird time to be an artist cause there’s so little real public funding and private funding is, you have to be commercially viable which translates into white, straight, and a dude. Which is like, so weird, that that’s…most of the world is not a straight white dude so why is that the entertainment they think makes money? They’ve shown if you make a series for Asian people or Black people or women, it’s going to do well. If it’s good.

JP: Tons of admiration for you cause you’ve done so many episodes. I was going through YouTube for "2 Girls 1 Asian", I was like “Holy shit!” They’re so long, too, with so much footage! It’s so much work, I was like, “Holy fuck, I have to get my life together!” It was so impressive and so great. I love your friendship with Kelly. It’s so cute and real.

KG: Yeah, I loved your series as well and I can’t wait to see more of it! I’m excited for season number 2!

JP: We’ve been so delayed…

KG: I feel like that’s Rule #2 of working in film. If Rule #1 is “Be Organized,” Rule #2 is “It’s fine if you’re not, cause no one else is!” Well, not really, but –

JP: It’s a beautiful mess. You have to fuck up a lot to get better. That’s the number one thing I’ve learned – you’re going to mess up two hundred times then maybe start getting a little bit better.

***

Thank you so much to both Julia Pugachevsky and Kaela Garvin for joining me for a cross-web-series discussion on Things Created By People’s Art Collision. Season 1 of Julia’s “Life After Fat” can be viewed in its entirety at lifeafterfatseries.com. Season 1 and the mid-season episode-thruple of Kaela Garvin and Kelly Colburn’s “2 Girls 1 Asian” is at 2girls1asian.com.

Both are moving forward with their second seasons in 2016 and have laid the groundwork – available right now for you to watch - to be exploring very enticing territory this year. Both shows come highly recommended from your loyal host here at Art Collision who would never steer you wrong.

As always, please hit me up if you are interested in being paired up with another artist and coming over to share a few drinks with me and another artist. It would truly be my pleasure and just an FYI – I ALWAYS provide the drinks, so you get to drink for free and talk about your own shit!

All original music featured in this episode - outside of the music in the web series clips - was by the amazing JULIAN, and you can find JULIAN’s work at soundcloud.com/jalapeno_boi.

Until next time.

"Don't date me, I'm the NSA": a conversation with Mary Anderson

Adam Cecil: Do you want to explain, in your own words, who you are?

Mary Anderson: Hi, my name is Mary Anderson. I am from Florida. I currently reside in Brooklyn, New York, and I’m an artist?

Adam: Question mark?

Mary: Question mark. Yeah.

---

Mary Anderson’s work — whether it’s a performance, an installation, or a tweet — frequently takes everyday objects and places them into new contexts in order to examine our relationships with ourselves and with others.

Take, for example, her project “The X-Files.” Inside plain blue files — the real life version of something you might find on your Mac’s desktop — are complete logs of all of her communication with anyone she’s ever kissed. Emails, letters, mixtapes, Facebook chats — the contents of these innocuous files represent the entire written record of a relationship. When I look at her files, I think of the vague threat of a permanent record somewhere at my old high school. I think, too, of the crushing banality of bureaucracy.

It’s a theme that she also explored in her interactive installation “Office Space,” created with collaborator Kate Weigel. Here, art peacefully co-existed with half-empty boxes of CapriSun. There was a dead flower and a bed of dirt inside of a desk drawer. The X-Files, too, lived in a plain black organizer on top of a desk, surrounded by grey cubicle walls.

Both of these works explored the idea of voyeurism (which made her the perfect subject of an episode of Spacebook, my documentary web series that explores its subjects’ lives through object history), but they also bring up questions of public and private space in the Internet Era. Who owns a conversation on Facebook, or, more importantly, who owns a shared experience?

Mary and I sat down a few weeks ago to discuss that question, as well social media performances, Burger King, and what happens when you co-opt a puddle.

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Adam: One of the things that I’ve dealt with in the past is finding a way to share a live performance in a way that’s more permanent. I’m wondering what you think about that and how you deal with that.

Mary: That’s such a difficult thing that I think about often. Really weird performances have so many aspects to them, and it’s hard to convey even through video or a written script of it. It’s almost impossible. They don’t accurately portray the event or the performance.

Recently, I’ve been thinking more about performance through social media. If the performance is through social media, then it’s a performance, but it’s also evidence of the performance. So if it’s both, it accurately portrays the intention more than just a piece of evidence of a performance where you’re still not clued in on what’s really going on. Who is in this performance? Were there specific moments where the performer interacted with people? That’s not portrayed in any of my stuff.

Adam: Do you think that looking back at the evidence of a social media performance is more accurate than, say, a video of a performance?

Mary: Yeah, definitely, yeah. Because there’s nothing that happens offline, really, so there’s nothing else to capture. In video, there are things that maybe the camera itself didn’t see or didn’t hear, and that’s lost. I guess that has a mysticism to it or a nice quality. But I think that when people don’t get the full story, they just get turned off by it.

Adam: But something is happening offline, though, right? Even if you’re just an individual person who’s like… I don’t know… an example that comes to mind immediately is that Periscope of the puddle. Do you know about that?

Mary: No.

Adam: It’s such an insane thing. But these people were in their office, there’s this big puddle outside their window, they called it the Drummond Puddle or something. I’ll share the Vice article with you, they did an oral history of it. But they just set up an iPhone and live-streamed it for hours. Almost half a million people live-streamed this puddle. And then it got to the point where someone went on it with a floatation device, and people were tweeting at him, and being like, “You’re a shithead. You’re a cunt. You’re ruining the puddle.”

Mary: Oh my God. That’s really funny, but also sad.

Adam: So, yes, if you save the Periscope video, that’s a record of it.

Mary: And those tweets are a record as well. But then what that guy experiences when he receives those tweets is not captured.

Adam: Right. All of those tweets exist out there, but how do you present them?

Mary: Yeah, especially since there’s so many media intertwining themselves together. You can be having a conversation that’s in reference to something that’s going on with Peach or something… even though that’s obviously a dead thing. Then you have all these different media, and what’s the best way to capture that? Multiple screenshots? That doesn’t feel right.

I guess the audience would have to just see each channel separately, looking at two paintings and acknowledging that they’re by the same artists.

Adam: To me, kind of like with this Vice article where they’re picking certain moments to share, you’re saying “These are the moments that defined the puddle.”

Mary: It’s curated, yeah.

Adam: Exactly. Inherently, by reliving it, you’re curating an aspect of it. For starters, there’s no way that one person who’s watching that Periscope can experience everything that’s also happening on Twitter, or happening somewhere else. Even if you’re following a hashtag or something. Anyone who is looking back at it later, it’s not the same experience.

Mary: Do you just accept that as part of the performance? This continual fuel of curation? Like, if it’s passed to me, I’m going to pull parts I think are funny, and then you’ll see it, and then you’ll pull parts you think are funny. It totally becomes something else.

Adam: As part of your live performances, there’s an audience there. And any performance artist is going to think, “Okay, the audience is part of this performance.” So I wonder, on social media, is there still that dichotomy between the performer and the audience? Is there a chance to break that barrier down even further?

Mary: When you say dichotomy between performer and audience in a live setting, you’re saying there’s a stage, right?

Adam: Even if there’s not, there is.

Mary: Even if there’s not, there is, right? So there’s me doing my thing to everyone else. Where in social media, maybe there’s a chance where it’s more person to person and that in itself is an artwork. It’s like me preaching or performing or acting to you or something, right?

I believe that could be a thing. I guess the thing that would stop me from totally agreeing with you right now is thinking about how many followers you have and how widely known you are. If I’m, I don’t know, Katy Perry talking to you, I’m going to be on the stage no matter what, right? Even if we’re just having a conversation, people are mostly going to be looking at me.

Adam: That reminds me of every time I see a Buzzfeed article that’s like, “12 Times J.K. Rowling Totally Owned People On Twitter.”

Mary: Yeah. And it’s like, there she is, she’s on her stage with her power. It’s about power, I think.

Adam: Thinking about that… I want to go back to the example of the puddle, but I understand that you didn’t see the puddle.

Mary: I want to see the puddle, though.

Adam: You have to go back. One of the things that happened was that Domino’s tried to co-opt it by having a delivery boy go with a Domino’s box—

Mary: Are you serious? That’s really funny.

Adam: It’s insane. Do you follow the Twitter account @BrandsSayingBae? It’s just this Twitter account that re-tweets terrible brand tweets that are trying to get in on these conversations, like Pizza Hut trying to respond to Kanye about liking anal or whatever. Why does Pizza Hut have to interject into that conversation? But it’s interesting because those brands expect to be the power player in that situation. Or expect to have the power.

legit nothing worse than brands .@'ing celebs and doing hack ass shit like this to be part of the conversation https://t.co/T5lkhxVGW2

— Brands Saying Bae (@BrandsSayingBae) February 17, 2016

Mary: But instead, they’re just laughed at. They’re the fool if they’re trying to get in on this. It’s just a weak attempt of branding or marketing.

People always talk about social media and the internet as the democratization of power. But it’s like… it’s still very much there and we’re all feeding into it in different ways.

Adam: Going back to before the puddle, what kind of social media performances have you done?

Mary: The first thing that comes to mind is a performance piece I did called “Come @ Me.” I would go to really big-name franchises like McDonald’s or the M&Ms factory or White Castle, where they have these really weird monuments of their mascot or their burger or whatever they’re trying to sell you. They’re just these weird, monolithic, ancient statues. In 2016, these things are really sad looking.

I would go in-person to these places and take weird photos with these objects, and then tweet at the company, and see if there was a conversation that would happen, or if they would tweet back at me, or if other people would tweet at it. I guess, projecting some kind of really personal loss or sadness onto such a huge, faceless company and seeing if they would respond. Is there sadness within that facelessness? Is this act of social media intervention a faceless act because they receive so many tweets all of time? Is it just screaming into the void?

There are so many things that could happen when you put something out in public. I think that’s interesting.

Adam: Did something interesting happen?

Mary: Yeah, so one of the tweets is based off Charles Ray’s Plank Piece, where he’s backed up against the wall, and the plank is hitting him and holding up against the wall. So I did that with these giant French fries that I got from Burger King. I tweeted the picture at them with the caption “You got me just where you want me” and #watchlikeaking because Burger King was having some kind of competition where they were like, “Hashtag this and you’ll get a lifetime supply of Burger King,” which I didn’t really want.

@BurgerKing you got me just where you want me #WatchLikeaKing pic.twitter.com/4KNndqiUte

— mary boo anderson (@whoismaryboo) March 31, 2014

But they tweeted back at me and they were like, #satisfried. And I was just like, “Okay. Is this what you want?” It was such a funny remark and, of course, it’s a pun, and I’m sure they respond with that to other people. I responded with #saddestfry. And then they didn’t respond to me.

@social_netwerk #Satisfried

— Burger King (@BurgerKing) March 31, 2014

@BurgerKing @Hemingwayboy95 between a fry and a hard place #wtfrenchfry pic.twitter.com/573AE2XdGj

— mary boo anderson (@whoismaryboo) March 31, 2014

Adam: So, in this mode of performance, you’re specifically recognizing that Burger King has the power, and then challenging that?

Mary: Yeah, definitely. Like a little boy who throws a rock at the king.

Adam: But they still tried to co-opt that.

Mary: Yeah, just like you were saying with the puddle. They want to be in on it. They want to be cool. Even if you’re making fun of them, they’re like, “Oh, you can’t make fun of me, I’m going to tweet back and then I’m a part of it.” It’s like, okay, you could try, but you’re still the ass of this joke.

I also did a video on Instagram at the Myrtle Wyckoff Burger King. They have all of these weird cars because they’re going for a ‘50s drive-thru aesthetic. I pretended I was under the car dying. I put ketchup on my body. And this little girl who’s eating her Happy Meal or whatever is walking around the car and seeing me do this performance. She goes, “Mom, I think she’s making a joke.” And then her mom is like, “I don’t know, honey. Let’s go this way.” And then ushers her away from me.

Licking my wounds @burgerking #watchlikeaking

A video posted by mary boo anderson (@whoismaryboo) on Mar 30, 2014 at 6:35pm PDT

Adam: So the performance is not just on social media. The performance is also the act of taking it. If you didn’t document it at all, had just done it at this Burger King and then it’s gone, how does that change that aspect of the performance to you? What is the “pre-social media” part to you?

Mary: It has such a different meaning because I wanted it to be this funny thing that would at least see the eyes of the social media manager of whoever runs these crazy, giant social media handles. But if there’s no social media involved, then the only people who are seeing it is the employees, and the people around. It’s just not the right audience for this piece if social media isn’t a part of it.

Adam: But the social media manager is also just an employee, too, right?

Mary: Yeah, that’s true. But she doesn’t have to deal with this in person, you know? It’s less in her face. She didn’t have to clean up ketchup that I spilled. I didn’t spill ketchup, though; I left it clean.

Adam: Does the interaction with whoever the faceless person who’s running the account even matter? They’re reacting to it, but they’re reacting to it as the company, not as themselves. You’re both performing.

Mary: I like the idea of talking to Burger King, as a concept, instead of people doing a day job. Because people who see it on Twitter, they’re going to see it as @BurgerKing, not at their social media manager. It’s the idea of having this fictional conversation.

Adam: From what I’m hearing, it’s like, even though there is a physical reality to your performance, it’s really happening in this weird otherworld.

Mary: Yeah, it’s fiction. I’m participating in a poem or a story rather than real life. I’m trying to have this conversation with a monolithic presence that is not personal at all, trying to have a conversation with them about something real, even though you know they don’t care enough to respond or are trying to co-opt it to sell me something or sell my followers something. I think there’s something interesting there.

Adam: One of the things I wanted to ask you about is, when you’re performing something, and maybe twenty people in the world ever see it, in a way, statistically, it’s like screaming into the void. That throws away the idea that you can change the world one person at a time, which is one of the whole points of our… whatever. But on social media, the way we interact with social media can be so fleeting as well. It’s not nearly as immediate. The idea of the fictional artifice, it almost throws up a wall in-between everyone involved.

I’m wondering how you deal with that as an artist, just how different dealing with something that’s very physical versus something that’s not, that’s just totally fictional.

Mary: Online, yeah, I guess it’s fleeting. I’m sure more people will probably see this work on my website than they will on Twitter, because it’s just so far back there and no one is going to backstalk me that hard unless they’re just a stalker.

Adam: I’ll have to do it.

Mary: Oh, my God, yeah. I’m sorry. It’s on my site. Just take it from there. But yeah, I think you still have impact there. Even though people will realistically only see your tweet or Instagram for five seconds tops, that does make a difference.

I just met, recently, for the first time some people who follow me on Twitter. They reached out to me. “Mary, you seem cool. We seem cool.” And we met up. I’ve hung out with them for a few times. They took note that I was interested in the same things as them and they reached out. Somehow, it’s still possible to have a connection and make a difference through something as fleeting and mindless as scrolling through a feed.

It’s not as fun as a real performance, though. You get so much adrenaline; you can feel the people there. They give you energy, you know? Social media, you can’t give energy as easily.

Adam: There are two big pieces that you’ve done, “Office Space” and “The X-Files,” that I feel tap into this office work setting. I know, when you made them, you were a student, which means you weren’t working in an office…

Mary: I was, actually, a part-time work-study job at an NYU office.

Adam: So what’s your relationship with offices, with files, with those physical objects that then find their way into your work? How did that happen for you?

Mary: “The X-Files” came before “Office Space,” and it was just this random thing. It wasn’t even for an assignment. I was just talking to my friend Kate and walking down the street, thinking about people I’ve dated in the past, remembering them, and thinking, “There’s just so much stuff I’ve forgotten,” and feeling sad about that. I don’t really miss these people, though, I just miss knowing about them, knowing about the relationship we had.

Adam: Because it’s also your life. You’re forgetting parts of your life.

Mary: Exactly, and it’s such a scary thing to be forgetting parts of your life. So I thought, “What if I just start logging everything?” Really, manically logging every single piece of information that anyone I’ve ever dated or kissed or whatever has ever sent to me as an attempt to save or preserve what we had in some weird way. So I did.

Later, Kate and I were proposing a show. We like installations because we think they’re fun and more accessible to people who are not really into art. We were talking about weird spaces we could appropriate, and I was working in an office at the time in a branch of NYU, their insurance branch. They just had a bunch of cubicles all curved in towards each other. No one sat at these cubicles, and there were just piles of trash. They called it “The Void.” They would tell me, “Oh, go put it in the Void. No one knows what to do with that. Don’t file it. Just put it in there.” It was actually terrifying.

But anyway, I would do remedial work and would sometimes take some of their office supplies to make art. I had already collected so much office supplies, and Kate and I were thinking about how offices are such a weird, sad place. They’re grey, and people spend most of their lives there, and they’re filled with small talk and bad Keurig coffee, and dust, and sitting in chairs for ten hours. It’s such a sad idea.

As an art student looking at that idea, looking at life with an idealistic lens, you’re like, “I don’t want that to be me. That seems sad. Those people can’t be happy.” Of course, you don’t really know that.

But the idea of sadness, I think, is so greatly personified through an office. Especially this office. We created a consulting agency, because what do consultants really do? No one really knows, so no one was going to ask us. We called it “Grey Square Consulting,” which is a play off of the white cube, which is a gallery, and the black box, which is a theater, and the grey square is just a purgatory of both. We were playing with performance, but also playing with a white box, and art, and what does that mean? And, of course, playing with the idea of voyeurism.

Adam: What part of an office personifies sadness for you?

Mary: So much of it. The cubicles, the grey barriers between people in old office spaces. They’re so sad. I don’t have a cubicle and I guess most people don’t now, because everyone’s moving to open work spaces in general. Which is also scary, in a different way. With a move away from traditional office spaces, companies are like, “Oh, we’re going to have a band tonight. Let’s have a happy hour. Look, we’ll play a game.” And I personally feel, as much as I enjoy free snacks, that it’s just a way to get you to stay there longer and never leave.

Adam: With cubicles, too, even though you’re surrounded by fake walls and it’s claustrophobic, it is a space that you can carve out as your own.

Mary: Definitely. At my current work situation, I don’t have a place to tack family photos or to be by myself and know that no one’s watching me. You’re always on view for everyone. What does that do to your mental space? There’s almost something comforting now, looking at this piece. Maybe this barrier was the right idea.

Adam: That almost sounds like you’re describing social media, where you’re always performing and onstage. Going back to “The X-Files” — Do you have a filing habit? Do you file things? Is that a thing that you do?

Mary: No. I was at a job where I filed all the time, and I was always printing out labels and stuff. I actually used their labels and labeling software to make the labels for “X-Files.” But no, other than that, I can barely keep a journal. But I was just so dedicated to preserving that, specifically.

Adam: Do you feel like you’ve succeeded? As far as the goal to remember.

Mary: Kind of. I loved the objects so much, these files. I would have loved to keep them up, but I kind of let them fall by the wayside recently. I haven’t been putting stuff in them. And there’s so much that happens offline, too, that can’t be documented this way.

I e-mailed someone who is in “The X-Files” just the other day, just sending him a letter to say hi and catch up. He sent me a nice letter in return, and then he goes “P.S. none of the foregoing messages you received can be used in ‘The X-Files’ without my permission.” I never told him about it! He found out through a friend and he was not happy about it. I was just like, “Oh, man, I’m sorry.”

Adam: That raises an interesting question. Right now, digital privacy is a huge deal. And going back to that idea that everything on social media is fleeting, even though there’s a permanent record of it — in a way, “The X-Files” is playing with the idea of recording the internet.

Mary: Definitely. Don’t date me, I’m the NSA. Yeah, I e-mailed him back saying, “Look, I’m sorry. I just feel like it’s better with these things to beg for forgiveness instead of asking for permission.” And he hasn’t responded back to me.

But at the same time, who says that he owns this correspondence? Let’s be real, if he’s talking to me on Facebook, Facebook really owns it more than either of us to some extent.

Adam: You’re going to have to ask Facebook for their permission to use it.

Mary: Right — is Facebook going to get upset? It’s so interesting. Most of the other people don’t know. I asked one of my ex-boyfriends, because I gave him all of these mixtape, to take a picture of them for me. And he did. And he didn’t ask why, which was just stupid on his part. But in the photos of these CDs, you can see him with his iPhone in the reflection of the CD, which is so nice. It’s a nice little tidbit.

Adam: There is that weird expectation of privacy for these digital conversations that are both private and not private. What do you think the difference is between literally printing out a conversation or writing a poem using the conversation? Or writing a performance based on the conversation, using actual quotes?

Mary: I think people generally feel less naked when you make a painting or a poem of something than when you print out verbatim what they say. I think that’s a scary thing. Mostly, we give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re not going to use anything against us. The government, too, and Facebook. People just think, “Oh, what will they do with it?” They don’t really think much about it.

The other day, I was thinking about how I wrote a poem in high school where I literally printed out my Google search history. My teacher got really upset with me, saying, “This is not a poem.” What’s the difference between that and me writing a poem that’s just not just verbatim something?

In my eyes, they’re really not different. I think to the viewers’ eyes, as in to whomever I’m writing about or constructing art about, it makes a difference to them. That’s where things get tricky. It’s like when you write books about people, and you don’t really change their names, and there’s lawsuits. Who owns a shared experience?

In a way, it’s kind of unbiased to just print out everything. I’m sure there’s a lot of bad stuff I’ve said.

Adam: But because you’re presenting it, do we have a bias towards you?

Mary: Yeah, exactly. I do have a resume for each person, which is totally biased. And the people who see this are going to be people who know me, or somehow hear about me, right? So there’s that bias.

There’s a precedent of art like this, too. Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, where she documented her child’s life for six years. And Sophie Calle’s The Hotel, where she went into people’s hotel rooms pretending to be a maid and taking pictures of their stuff. To me, I think there’s still no call. It’s so grey. But I’m sure the person who found out about “The X-Files” does not see it as grey. Do you have thoughts? Do you think it’s wrong?

Adam: I think it’s interesting. To me, I go into pretty much all social media or whatever with the idea that it could get out there, you know? Reading Jon Ronson’s book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, made me realize that you can’t change how people perceive things over the internet. If you present something and you think it’s funny, whether in private or even putting it out publicly, someone can find it really offensive, and then they share it with other people who find it really offensive.

Mary: Yeah, and then there’s a hate group for you.

Adam: I think the biggest example is just all women who ever say anything about feminism on Twitter. It’s just a breeding ground for all hatred.

Mary: #NotAllMen, or whatever the fuck. My God, the stupidest thing.

Adam: You can’t change how things are perceived. But social media is different. I’ve gone to performances where I’ve thought, “I don’t like that.” But I don’t think, “Oh, I hate that person.” I might not even think, “Oh, I had a bad time.” Because even bad performances are still interesting to think about. Whereas on social media, everything is a performance until it’s not. Anything where someone takes you seriously, or just twist it in order to make it fit their narrative… maybe that’s just a performance, too.

Mary: I’m with you on that. I feel like I have such an Edward Snowden mentality, where I’m like, “Look, everything I say is pretty much going to be recorded at all times.” Especially on social media. You know it’s there and will be there forever in some sense.

Adam: Hence, the wisdom of the auto-tweet remover.

Mary: But people are lulled into a sense of false security somehow.

Adam: Plus, the assumption that no one is ever going to go that far back into your history, right? But then there are those stories from when Trevor Noah was becoming The Daily Show host, and people pulled back those tweets from like, three years ago where he said some stupid, sexist things. But then the narrative becomes, “He’s sexist now because of these tweets.”

I think it’s a good example of the difference between a comedy performance on Twitter and comedy performance in a nightclub. If he said these things in a nightclub, people would’ve just forgotten about them, and he could’ve realized, “Oh, those jokes are stupid and shitty, and I shouldn’t be saying them.”

But now that they’re on Twitter, he might still have that realization, but they’re just there, forever. And then it’s like your entire history just becomes flat. There is no history. Who you are in the past is who you are, now and forever.

Mary: You were talking about when women tweet something about feminism online, and people attack this person… they were just saying something about their experience. It’s not necessarily a shared experience. In “The X-Files”, I’m saying something, but there’s another person directly involved. I feel like that’s so tricky somehow.

Adam: There is that weird thing with the difference between public and private online. Nothing is private. To me, just thinking about the amount of screenshots of text message conversations I get. What’s the difference between sending a screenshot of a conversation to a friend and putting it in a permanent art project or in a gallery?

Mary: Exactly. One person sees it or a hundred people see it. That’s still a tiny percentage of everyone.

Adam: And if the problem is that someone else saw it, then it doesn’t really matter how many people it was. The transgression is the same.

Mary: And maybe you shouldn’t have written that. Yeah. It’s all up for grabs. Even at work, I tweet about my co-workers. And it’s nothing mean, just things they say that I think are funny. I’ll tweet, “Coworker said this today,” just using capital-C Coworker as an all-encompassing identity. It’s just the idea of a coworker.

But it’s not the same as screenshotting someone they said. It’s kind of like I’m extracting it. It’s more like me writing a poem.

Adam: It becomes a performance around the idea of what a coworker is.

Mary: Definitely. The idea of an office space. The idea of coworker. The idea of Burger King. It’s more fun to think about them that way. Even the idea of an ex-partner is kind of nice. I guess they all become ideas once it’s over, you know?

Adam: And just the act of curating or putting it away becomes art and abstracts it to a certain degree. Even a printed off Google search history…

Mary: It’s still abstracted. It’s still curated. It’s still very specific to that day. And it’s still a screenshot. Even if it didn’t take critical skill, it’s still an idea. You don’t need skill to create art.

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You can find more evidence of Mary Anderson’s work and existence at her website and follow her on Twitter to get her latest social media performances delivered right to your phone.

The years it took to Brave The Night

Matt Bravmann, under the stage and recording name of Brave the Night, is rounding the masses and taking them on a spiritual journey with his debut album, Mind on Fire. The album, which was released in early September, features a unique combination of bluesy and jazzy melodies. Matt’s fingers dance along piano keys and his voice distracts listeners of all else occupying their minds. The intimacy and vulnerability in his music can turn audiences into eavesdroppers; but, ultimately, this soul-reaching music invites self-reflection and contemplation. Mind on Fire is comprised of those overwhelming feelings weighing you down. His music is to be felt. It demands to be felt.

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This interview has been edited and condensed.

Natalia Lehaf:  I wanted to start with your background in music. When did you first start having an interest in music?

Matt Bravmann:  I started taking piano lessons when I was about four years old. I took them for a while and loved it at first and then I hated it. You know, I was a little kid; I just wanted to be outside and play sports. So I quit. My parents kept making me practice but I didn’t want to. I got back into it later on when I started playing songs I wanted to play as opposed to songs they wanted me to play. It was a lovely 360 because through playing shitty pop songs I had gotten back into playing the songs I originally didn’t want to play, like classical music. When I was eighteen I started taking serious jazz lessons with a really great teacher. I started playing gigs in high school. I played at –

NL: Nursing homes, right?

MB: Right, nursing homes and restaurants, because I didn’t live in a city so I couldn’t go and play in a bar. I traveled to New York City once to play at Brandy’s Piano Bar on the Upper West Side when I was seventeen. I remember that being a huge deal for me. When I went to college I started having steady gigs at coffee shops.

NL: Is your family musical?

MB: Yeah, my dad plays the piano. He gave me lessons for a bit.

NL: Do you play any other instruments?

MB: No, I tried. I tried the clarinet and the guitar, but I didn’t like them and I wasn’t very good. With the guitar, you develop terrible callouses on your fingers – especially when you’re first starting. With the clarinet, you need a tremendous amount of breath, and even from a young age my parents always thought I was a smoker because I couldn’t even hold my breath under water.

NL: Was music a big part of your life as a kid?

MB: Yeah, definitely. First of all, I grew up Jewish. Music is a big part of Jewish services. There are also a lot of minor chords in Jewish music, which is a little sadder but also more personal. At a young age, when I heard “Moonlight Sonata” or The Beatles or classic pop rock music, it was ingrained that this was important – beyond pop culture. There was something there that stuck with me.

NL: What triggered your return to music?

MB: I think just growing up and becoming more mature in my musical tastes. I would start to listen to music that I could play and wanted to play. We always had a piano in our house, sometimes two, so I would be playing every now and then even after I quit.

NL: What would you qualify as more mature music?

MB: I would say older artists. So much music has had an impact on me. When I heard gospel music for the fist time, my life changed. It was serious, it wasn’t fun. When I heard “Border Song” by Elton John, that was the first time I heard gospel music applied to rock ‘n’ roll, pop, and other elements. And that was something I wanted to do – I wanted to play that. Pink Floyd was another big one for me, when I heard The Wall and also The Beatles. Some songs have that rare quality where it’s like, “this is a big deal.” They hit you at the core and are spiritual experiences.

NL: When you were performing in high school, were you performing covers?

MB: Yeah, I only performed covers. I started writing music in college.

NL: Did you ever want to start a band?

MB: I wanted to start a band, but there was no connection with anyone where I thought starting a band was a realistic endeavor.

NL: So, you’ve spent a lot of alone time working on your music.

MB: And in general.

NL: How was that?

MB: I don’t want to say I was a lonely child, but in a lot of ways I was. I think being a performer, the alchemy is, you are sitting on stage and divided, literally, from the audience. The mass of people is looking at you and you are up there alone. It’s very symbolic of the process. There is an inherent separation between you and mass society. The alone time I spent as a kid was traumatic at times, but at the same time – this is going to get philosophical quickly, which I tend to do – all of my pain and weakness is also the source of my strength, creativity, and inspiration. You know, I needed that to write music. I never would have written music if I didn’t have that pain and solitude to look back on.

NL: I read that you started writing music to share your pain.

MB: Right. I don’t think that is unique to me at all.

NL: Is there anything in particular that you write about?

MB: It was more of a general sense of insecurity, and the pain that a lot of people experience but that you don’t know they are experiencing. You know, when you are growing up, you think you are the only one who has these problems – and in some ways you’re not, but in a lot of ways you are. There was never a specific event or incident.

NL: Do you think your music comes from a lonely place?

MB: Yeah. It’s interesting, because I started writing this album when I was twenty years old and didn’t finish it until I was twenty-four, twenty-five. The next album is going to come from a much different place, which is a tremendous challenge for me. It won’t be a place of desperation and loneliness, but of satisfaction and confidence and appreciation of myself and for others. That’s the way it should be: I think you need to evolve as an artist. I have no interest in making a sequel or follow-up to the last album. I want my music to evolve, but at the same time it is going to be difficult doing that. In the past, I’ve found my way of tapping into what I found to be my best stuff is tapping into the pain and the same melancholic places where I used to think inspired the creativity. I’ve started writing new music and it has not been easy.

NL: Was there a message you were trying to put out there with this first album?

MB: There wasn’t a coherent message. The message is in the title, Mind on Fire. The album is an identity crisis. It’s about contradictions and fear and insecurity and vulnerability. It’s about growing up. I’m on fire. It’s just very overwhelming to be a young twenty-year-old in New York.

NL: What was your song-writing process like?

MB: I wrote the first batch of songs while I was in college and about two years ago I wrote the second batch of songs. This album is the best of those batches.

NL: It’s very lyrically-driven. Do you have a favorite lyric or song you are proud of?

MB: You know, songwriters too often say, “every one’s my baby.” I don’t have a favorite lyric. I very rarely listen back to it. Sometimes I’ll listen and be like, “that’s a good line.”

NL: That’s interesting that you don’t listen to it, because I added the EP to my Spotify playlist. I find it really comforting.

MB: Interesting. I was very self-conscious when I released it - and still am - that it’s a downer, in the sense that it is kind of depressing. You know, “does it bring you down? Does it lift you up?”; almost universally, it doesn’t do either of those things. It’s more optimistic than I give it credit for.

NL: “Long Way to California” is one of my favorites, that one is cheerful.

MB: That one is a very optimistic song and I initially wanted to end the album on that. A big theme on the album is contrast – even the cover: a dark background with a very bright imagery up front. And a lot of the lyrics are melancholic but also hopeful.

NL: How did you choose the cover art?

MB: I had an idea for what I wanted the art to be and I hired an artist who took it from there.

NL: I know that you have a demanding job as the Digital Strategy Manager at the digital marketing, advertising, and publicity agency Brigade. How do you balance your music with your other obligations?

MB: My job is very creative, too, and I feel like there is a tank of creative energy that you fill up sometimes. It’s been hard and it’s not something I’ve conquered yet. I finished this album before I got this job. So my next challenge is writing my next album from a new mental and spiritual place and balancing this with my day job.

NL: Do you have any big dream musical ambitions?

MB: Yeah, to get better. I want the music to evolve paralleling my personal identity. As I evolve as a human being, I want my music to evolve. I make music for music. If I get paid for it, that’s great. But I don’t need to make a lot of money off of it. Five years ago, it was “do or die, make or break.” But now, I’ve made peace with it. I do it on the side and I don’t get the fame or notoriety from it — not yet — but there is nobody telling me what to do. I write what I want, I do want I want and that freedom is not something I take for granted.

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To learn more about Matt and his music, check out Brave the Night's website, like the Facebook page, add the songs to your Spotify playlist, and listen on Soundcloud.

Art Collision: Francis Steakknife & Johnny Darlin

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Transcript:

One of my favorite moments as an artist living in New York are those magical, perhaps slightly tipsy, one-on-one conversations with other artists. Whether they be friends, collaborators, or strangers you just met at a party, they almost always contain at least a morsel of intense value. Being an artist can be lonely — focusing on something that is part of your soul, and giving it most of your energy, creative and otherwise. When that inward experience turns outward and you are met with someone with similar dreams and living the same confusing but beautiful life, and who believes in you and whom you believe in, it’s impossible not to leave feeling encouraged or at the very least, a bit less alone. Like you’re not being left behind.

I’ve had the idea for a while to turn those moments that happen so frequently in private, into something more public and concrete, all while also giving artists the platform to premiere some of their work. To force two artists to become experts on the other’s output, and then throw them into a conversation and see what happens.

For this first episode, I have made myself, Michael Doshier — I go by Johnny Darlin as an artist — one of the artists. And I can’t think of anyone else Johnny Darlin or Michael Doshier would rather have as my partner than my first guest, Steven Zemanian a.k.a. Francis Steakknife. If the prerequisite for this is being an expert on each other’s work, there’s no one better to join me than Steven. We know each other very well personally and creatively; he produced four out of the five songs on my first EP, Mr. Monogamy, released last year, and is producing three out of the one coming out in 2016. He is a producer who can bring out the brightest lights and the deepest darks in any song I write. He is also a solo artist whose efforts as such I have seen draw hundreds of drunk mid-20s ghouls to a Halloween party in a basement where we shouldn’t have been smoking inside but we were anyway, and where I touched the stair railing only to have my hand soaked in vomit, then stood outside a locked bathroom to wash it off because people were inside fucking their brains out. (And by the way, there is no doubt in my mind the underlying sex drive pulsing in his beats drove these ostensibly sane humans into such animalistic territory).

Despite our collaborative friendship he is also a creative shrouded in mystery for me — especially when it comes to his solo work that somehow finds itself on the Internet seemingly randomly, enlivening my newsfeed with sounds quite different than anything we’ve ever produced together. I was interested to crack this case.

This is Johnny Darlin in conversation with Francis Steakknife, and our favorite drink together is Blue Moon.

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Michael Doshier: Today I am joined by Steven Zemanian, also known as Francis Steakknife. I have worked with him on several projects, in fact, most of my musical projects. I’m very excited to have his perspective today. Thank you for joining me, Steven.

Steven Zemanian: I’m excited to be here, thank you.

MD: Steven has an amazing pet bunny named Marvin who is joining us in the studio today (by studio I am referring to his awesome apartment); how is Marvin doing today, Steven?

SZ: He looks pretty good; he’s flopped out right now; you were just here and he ate dinner in front of us so he’s happy but he likes to sleep after dinner.

MD: He looks very content.

***

MD: When it comes to artistic physical spaces that our work together has manifested itself within, I have a surprisingly large amount of places come to mind: a recording studio in Virginia, your parents’ attic in Virginia, this apartment, my apartment, NYU recording studios. And as you’ve mentioned before, space is an important concept to you in regards to recording. I’ve heard you say things like “it’ll be cool to get a vocal take in the same space we recorded the instruments.” And this has always intrigued me because I don’t understand it myself and I find it a really beautiful concept. I would love to get you to elaborate a little on that for me — what does space mean to you in regards to recording music?

SZ: Space is extremely important. It’s an important part of mixing and recording, to make everything sound like it’s either in a surreal environment or a realistic environment. You’re trying to put the listener in the best place to hear the sound when you’re recording and mixing. You kind of want to give them the best place in the house, and that house can be either real or imaginary, which is always fun.

MD: Still in this area of conversation about space, I will say that for me the Francis Steakknife eras that come to mind are Francis-Steakknife-in-Virginia and the work you’ve produced there and Francis-Steakknife-in-New-York-City and I’m curious as to how to the change in physical location has done for you creatively. Has New York made you see the world differently in any sort of way? And has that been affecting the music you’ve been creating?

SZ: Virginia is definitely a much slower pace, and I don’t know if I’ve necessarily thought about how the living environment has affected my music; I don’t know if my music is any faster or more aggressive now. But I loved walking around Norfolk, and that’s one of the things I love about New York is you can walk everywhere; you don’t have to drive anywhere. But yeah, the walking pace and maybe our natural tempos are very different between the two [places]; you can kind of walk however you want in Virginia, whereas in New York you have to keep up with everybody and pass people. Even if you’re not really going anywhere important, you have to act like an asshole and pass somebody; it’s just the way it all works.

MD: I was listening to Delusions — the first album I ever had of yours. That I noticed had more jazz and blues influences in certain songs than I have in more recent work you’ve created in New York.  What are your thoughts on these first Francis Steakknife productions?

SZ: The point with Delusions was I really wanted to make music with a lot of my friends, so most of them are featured on it from college. It was a lot of fun; the whole point was Vincent Van Gough — I loved and still do really like his artwork. So, all of the tracks are named after Vincent Van Gough pieces and I tried to think about how musically to interpret the artwork. The blues and jazz influences come from me being very much interested in strange chord progressions back then, and still am but have tried to reign it in a little more, because some of the things were a little far out.

MD: I want to talk to you about sequencing and cohesiveness. I remember when you asked me my thoughts on Groucho Karl before it had been released, one of my notes was how cohesive the album was from track to track and from beginning to end. As a playwriting student, I come from the world of storytelling and trying to get the story “right.” When we were working on Mr. Monogamy together, both sonically and lyrically it was important to me to put the songs in an order that told some sort of story.

SZ: As far as Groucho Karl goes, I really lucked into a three-act structure. It’s three failed concepts I smashed together, and I used gapless playback to drive that point home further; all the songs go into one other. The songs themselves are little sketches from my notebook I had at the time and I was really into the idea that it should be incomplete; I would sometimes try to make complete songs out of them but it wouldn’t work, so I’d just leave them how they were in little one minute and two minute things that lead into one another. When I ended up sequencing it, I was in New York and had a bunch of material (some of it wasn’t very good) and I tried to take the best parts of it and smash it all together.

MD: In that way, it’s a collection of ideas and thoughts and musical inspirations you’ve had throughout a long period of time in multiple areas. You didn’t sit down and say “I’m going to release this record in this amount of weeks,” it’s more a matter of you being in multiple areas and while you were in New York, finding the ones that worked together. You were building a cohesiveness instead of creating one from the get-go. That’s interesting that it’s something I consider very cohesive and it’s literally an album construed of things you consider failures.

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Francis Steakknife (Steven Zemanian) and Johnny Darlin (Michael Doshier)

MD: I have a sort of selfish question. I am curious as to what your favorite track we’ve done together is and if you could tell me why and what that process was like for you.

SZ: “You’ve Quit Praying for Me, Babe” is not out yet, but it will be.

MD: So what’re your first steps? For a lot of our collaborations, we A) work together in a studio and come up with melodies we like, B) sometimes you’ve done full productions on your own and are curious what I can add as a songwriter and vocalist on top of it, and C) sometimes I write songs on my own and send to you and see where they take you as a producer and you turn demos into full songs. So I’m curious what that latter option is like for you.

SZ: So I listen to it and give it a good think and think about what the overall message of the song is, and maybe go from there. If I can use some sort of element to add to that and drive home that this is the message of that song. And then I’ll think about what’s the main instrument of the song — a lot of times with you, it’s the piano, so I will build something around the piano and leave space for the piano that you will eventually play and work my own production around the piano.

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SZ: There are a lot of things I don’t know about your process. I know with “Nervous Girl/Whiskey Shot” I ended up recording most of the instrumental to that in the Catskills. I really didn’t know what to do with it; I knew I wanted to make a banging pop song (which is sort of a weird thing to do in the middle of the woods). I had no direction lyrically, so I’m wondering what the song is even, broadly, about.

MD: My actual favorite part of the Mr. Monogamy creative process was “Nervous Girl/Whiskey Shot” and “~MaGiCaL! ;)~” because the challenge was that I would be writing to a beat like Ester Dean or some other titan in the pop industry who is given productions and asked to turn them into the biggest hit ever, so that was a very fun role to play. It’s appropriate that I’m getting a little bit drunk now because I did write that song in the shower. All my roommates were gone, I brought my laptop into the bathroom, I had a few pregame beers by my lonesome, and I took a shower and just played “Nervous Girl/Whiskey Shot” the instrument on loop over and over again, while at the same time having my phone on record so whatever I was singing in the shower would be recorded.

I had an idea called “Moody Girl/Whiskey Shot” because I liked the combination of those two phrases separated by a backslash, based off one of my friends who was the life of a party and everyone’s favorite girl at the party, but was getting drunker and drunker and messier and messier throughout the course of the party. I thought “this is a very typical image of anyone our age and of my relationship with her specifically, but I find something poetic about it.” So I channeled my own anxiety that I experience and substituted “moody” for “nervous.” So it’s a combination of that story and my own anxieties and how I act those out by drinking and turning up, which is fun and deals with anxiety in the moment, but I think the song on your end has a darkness to it that musically drives home that it isn’t necessarily the healthy option.

SZ: The next song is “My Sister Went out on a Date Tonight.” Walk me through the sentiment behind that song.

MD: My actual sister was getting ready for an actual date, and I was coming to terms with the idea of coming out to my family. So those anxieties were mixed with my sister who was going on dates that she did not have to explain to my parents, but not only that, they were excited for her and helping her get ready for it. I played a drum loop in GarageBand and started singing over it, literally telling the story of what was actually happening.

SZ: Marvin is freaking out in his crate.

MD: Yes, Marvin is ready to come out and talk to us about his debut album coming out soon.

SZ: I recorded the instrumentals for what came to be “Nervous Girl” and “~MaGiCaL! ;)~” both in the Catskills, at the woods in my Uncle’s house. I didn’t know what to do with it from there because it was a big maximalist pop song, and I sent it to you and you sent it back with something awesome. I really wanted the song to be a very happy instrumental but a very sad lyrical juxtaposition. I actually don’t know where you were mentally when you wrote the lyrics and melody to that song.

MD: As a queer person, I feel like romantic and sexual development for a lot of us is delayed, in the sense that minor crushes and romantic things that hit your heart and interests may take more of a toll on you than had you been dating and kissing and fooling around as a young person. A lot of queer people don’t do that because they’re repressed until they can do that on their own. So the chorus is “How magical that feels, after all these years.” And the line about “I wanted you to meet my family” is supposed to take on an extra weight, for me at least, because that’s a very lofty goal for a lot of queer people: to feel so strongly about someone else that you’d risk the awkwardness of introducing them to your family. So, it was sort of about, what it feels like when a relationship goes wrong in the context of this delayed development.

SZ: That leaves us to the final track of the EP, “Try (For Me).”

MD: I wrote the first version of it as a part of a musical I wrote in middle school. Then, I kept it in my head long enough for it to be there for the Mr. Monogamy process so I revamped it. It’s weird to hear eighth-grade Michael’s melodic thoughts and some of the same lyrical thoughts be released as twenty-three year old Michael’s output into the world and artistic space.

Because it was our first song working on together in person, it was highly collaborative. I remember you teaching me things about how the piano syncs to the computer and how we can manipulate the piano to sound like other things. That was a challenging thing for me to play the piano as if it was going to be the bass. Those were exciting moments for me to grow as a musician at twenty in your attic; it was our first real in-person, teaching each other things, expressing ourselves creatively, which adds an extra layer of it being special.

Thank you for joining me, Steven. This has been awesome and it’s so cool to talk about the past we went through together, but go into a deeper arena as to what we were going through individually in the process. I learned a lot about what you were going through throughout the making of our EP, so thank you for joining me.

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I’m going to let 13-year-old me continue to croon as I say thank you to Steven for joining me today. Francis Steakknife’s prolific collection of music can be found at francissteakknife.com or francissteakknife.bandcamp.com.

And Johnny Darlin can be found at johnnydarlin.com or soundcloud.com/johnnydarlin. His Mr. Monogamy EP is also available on iTunes. Both expect to release new music in 2016.

And I want to also say that, as fun as it was getting to talk about my own process, I am excited by the opportunity to invite other artists — friends or strangers to each other — into my home, so that I can sit back and watch inspiration-via-engaging dialogue enter the room, as it did between me and Steven. I invite anyone interested to join me in this journey, whether you have an EP, a play, a web series, an art show. Whether you work as a vocalist, an actor, a writer of long form narratives, non-fiction, or poetry. Whether you’ve been reviewed by enough publications to gather a Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes or just finished your first song yesterday and have a stage name no one has heard of but yourself. No matter what you do or where you are in that doing, you’ll make two new friends who will become experts on your work, and you’ll have it featured online through the amazing Things Created By People. If you’re interested, reach out with a link to your work and your favorite thing to drink over conversations like these. Until next time.

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If you would like to contact Michael about participating in the next Art Collision, email him at michaeladoshier@gmail.com.

Néha Hirve: the visual artist behind the Winter 2016 cover photo

Néha Hirve is a graduate of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. When she created this issue's cover photo, she was a year out of NYU and getting a Masters in Photojournalism in Sundsvall, a small town in the north of Sweden, at Mittuniversitetet. She’d wake up, eat knäckerbröd with Kalles Kaviar for breakfast, go to class until five, sometimes grab a beer, and then go home. There, she did some reading to get inspired, and then as the sun set, she would head to the school’s media lab to use the tablet for her graphic designs. As she was usually the only person in the building at that hour, she would play music as loud as she wanted, having an illustration party until one or two in the morning. Néha sacrificed hours of sleep for her craft. She took every ounce of energy — an energy that for most people is nonexistent at the end of the day — and poured it into creating a vision. And given the final result, the sacrifice and labor seemed well worth it.

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This interview has been edited and condensed.

Natalia Lehaf: You have a background in film at NYU. Did your studies impact your graphic design work at all?

Néha Hirve: I think that being a cinematographer at NYU taught me to see light and colour. My graphic design work heavily involves light and colour, most of my illustrations are set in the night time where the light makes itself present in strange ways. I think I always had the scenes inside me, but NYU gave me the tools to express them. I see things more cinematically since NYU. I also think more about narrative in my work.

NL: Do you have any pieces you can pinpoint as examples of that?

NH: Well, the piece with the bear (“It's hard to reach out to you...”) is an example of that. I recently moved to the North of Sweden and I took a camping trip with some Finns in the Höga Kusten (high coast) and that's what inspired that piece. Spending the night under those trees, such tall trees, I could really feel a presence in the history of that area. My work doesn’t necessarily have a fixed narrative or "plot" in terms of a beginning, middle, or end, as a film would, per se. But they're definitely a moment in a larger personal narrative. I like to leave it to the viewer to construct that larger narrative for themselves. My titles are sort of alluding to a larger story, too; they add another layer to the scene.

NL: I wanted to ask about your tag lines for each image, actually. Where does the inspiration stem from? Is it the same place as the inspiration for the image?

NH: They're maybe snippets of a conversation I overheard once or a song or sometimes the warped memory of a song I’ve heard long ago. I always come up with the titles after the image, and usually they just fit with the overall feeling and atmosphere of a piece. For the most recent piece, it was sort of a joke — I'd been listening to a song by the Tallest Man on Earth on repeat for the entire process (which had something similar to that line in it), which took about 30 hours, and felt like a thousand years.

NL: Do all designs usually take that long?

NH: They're taking longer and longer. I am an impatient person, so my initial work I'd rush to finish; they'd take a few hours at most. Then once I started settling into my style, which is very detailed line work and hatching, I learned to get into a sort of trance state and really enjoy the labor of it. Once I discovered I could do it all in Photoshop, my canvas size became unlimited. So yeah, they're pretty tedious to do!

NL: Oh dang.

NH: Yeah, you need to be a bit obsessive to do this, I think.

NL: Are you able to work on other projects while in the middle of a design, or do you only focus on one project at a time?

NH: I'm also a photojournalism student, so there are a lot of creative projects vying for my attention, so I focus on just one illustration at a time. I have a long list of ideas and images, but once I get into a project, I can't work on another until I finish it.

NL: I know that you are getting a Masters in Photojournalism in Sweden. Where are you pursuing your degree? How long is the program?

NH:I was born in India. I grew up in India, in the USA and in Switzerland. I only moved to Sweden a few months ago. The program is two years long.

NL: And are there certain stories you wish to tell via photography rather than film or graphic design?

NH: I'm inspired by my dreams, my memories, and the things around me. Right now, the woods and the sky are heavily featured in my work. The trees here are different, the light is different. Being so close to the Arctic Circle really changes the quality of the twilights. And after five years in New York City, I'm finally seeing the stars again.

NL: That must be nice. What is your favorite medium to work in?

NH: I love working with ink and paper. I love the physical mark that it makes, and I come from a long background of scientific diagram-drawing, which I find very relaxing. There are disadvantages to that though, so I recently switched over to an all-digital workflow - a Wacom tablet and Photoshop. It's a steep learning curve, but it allows you to correct your mistakes non-destructively!

NL: Is there any story you are trying to tell with your work? Any message?

NH: Although most of the pieces are a bit surreal and unsettling, I want to evoke a feeling of a very distant memory or dream. Although the exact memory itself isn't defined or necessarily describable in any words, we all wake up from dreams whose emotions and colors are vivid and real. Even though they can be unsettling, we re-remember them over and over to get a 'hit' of those emotions and colors. I want to create this sense in the viewer. In a nutshell I would call my stuff "memories of dreams." I had all these dreams when I was a kid, of being outside, of being under the moonlight and looking in on lit up windows and longing for that comfort and warmth.

NL: I know you are in Hungary right now. Has this experience affected any of your work thus far?

NH: I actually just got back to Sweden. I was on the Hungarian-Austrian border photographing and documenting refugees. I think that this experienced definitely changed me. We met thousands and thousands of refugees being funneled through the border, paradoxically made invisible. I'm working on a photo-essay about that experience, but I think it will also inspire my illustration. There were trains that would pull up in the dead of night, and literally two thousand people would climb out in silence.

NL: Wow. That's intense. I'm excited to see what these graphic experiences inspire in your upcoming work.

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Néha is a photographer and visual artist based in Northern Sweden. Her work is based on memories of dreams she may or may not have had at some point in her life. You can find more of her work on her Instagram or website.

A document of the moment: an interview with Jake Fertig

Jake Fertig.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Adam Cecil: First off, do you want to just explain what you do as an artist?

Jake Fertig: That’s a question that I’ve been trying to figure out for myself for a while. The way to formulate my interests and the work that I do into one collective unit has been something that I’ve been thinking about consciously a lot, especially in the last few months.

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Jake Fertig is an independent filmmaker.

Jake Fertig is a musician.

Jake Fertig is a writer.

Jake Fertig is an actor.

Jake Fertig is an artist, living and working in Brooklyn, New York.

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Jake: The biggest project I’m working on, that I spend every day working on, is a feature film called Howeds.

I’m working on it with my girlfriend, Emily Dalmas. Frankly, she’s the best person I’ve ever met. We wrote it together, we’re producing it together, we both act in it. I’m directing it, I play the main character in it, and its semi-autobiographical.

Howeds is about my high school experience. It’s about a group of Jewish-American teenage guys who are very sheltered and a little bit teased in their community. It’s kind of an anti-Coming-of-Age movie.

That’s the main project we’re working on. We’re anticipating releasing it towards the end of next year.

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Jake Fertig graduated from NYU Tisch with a BFA in Film in 2013. Since then, his day job has been producing video content for various companies and organizations. He currently works at Mashable. Howeds will be his first feature film.

He met Emily during his second year at NYU. Emily is also a graduate of the film program. Since graduating from NYU in 2013, she has worked as an NBC Page and is currently a Field Production Assistant for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

They live together in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

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Jake: There’s this slate of projects that I’ve tried to put in one linear order. Our production company is called Perestroika, and Howeds is the first project. The second project that I want to work on is an album that I’ve been writing for the last two years.

My other main interests are singing and songwriting and music production. I’ve been in a band for the last five years called Marguerito. We just released our latest album in May. Basically, we’re an indie rock band. I’m in it with three other guys that I met in high school.

I’ve been trying to formulate — How do I not do these two separate things at the same time?, especially when I’m working a full-time job. How do I put it together into one thing?

What I’ve settled on is music videos. We shot two music videos for the last album. From there, I started to formulate this idea of creating videos that support the music in a very specific and concrete way. Most music videos that I see don’t really relate to the source material very strongly. They’re a completely separate idea from the music itself.

So, the next project I’m working on is an album, that I want to release under my own name, called Essential Problem. I have all the songs written, and right after we finish shooting Howeds, while it’s in editing, I’m going to record them. Then, I’m going to shoot music videos for each song on the record so that it’ll play as a movie or as a straight-forward narrative. They’ll all fit within the same narrative of what this record is about, which is a very personal record about my experience over the past two or three years, mostly in my personal life:

• the start of my relationship with my girlfriend (we’ve been dating for about two and a half years)
• the complications at the beginning of our relationship:
  • just being able to get to that point of vulnerability with someone and
  • really trusting them.

For me, the whole idea of Essential Problem was this question of, like, Do I have some kind of problem that’s going to prohibit me from being able to fully invest in this relationship? and trying to process that. That’s what this record is about, and the film version of it.

I know that was a very lengthy answer.

Adam: When I watched Honored by the Sign at the Cinema, I noticed that exact thing you were just describing, where the music video really concretely backs up the lyrics in the song. How do you make that work? What I thought was really striking was that the family in the video, it seemed like, I don’t know if that was your family…

Jake: The parents were my parents. The little sister in the song is inspired by the little sister of one of my best friends, and she’s in the video.

It’s supposed to be representative of the culture of the people that I grew up with in Wayne, New Jersey. I was born in Queens and my family moved to suburban New Jersey when I was eight years old. It was only about a half-hour before you came that I really started to fully realize that I really felt like an outsider a lot of my time growing up in Wayne. I think it’s partially because I’m Jewish and from Queens, but I didn’t even realize that I felt a little bit like an outsider by being Jewish in New Jersey because, you know, it’s not Wyoming.

Basically, I saw this sign, and it said, “Happy Birthday Michelle” on it, and I was like, “This is so representative of the culture of this town, that’s such a depressing way to have your birthday celebrated." In reality, it’s kind of a nice thing.

Adam: I felt that from the song and the video, that duality of, oh, that’s really sweet but also really fucking depressing.

Jake: Exactly! So the first half of the song is every shitty thing I felt and could think of, and the second half is totally inspired by my friend’s little sister and their relationship. I could see the joy on his face whenever she would enter a room. She’s the light of the family. So I was trying to find a little bit of beauty, God, light in that world.

Adam: I feel like I haven’t seen a music video quite like this, and I’m wondering if you have a specific inspiration for it. Where, exactly, did the genesis of this idea come from? Why did you want to do this?

Jake: It felt intuitive. I’m sure there are a million reference points. But I don’t really know. I was happy with how Honored came out and I feel like this is a good idea. Most albums that I love have a sense of narrative, even if it’s not so obvious or linear, it’s just that… you know what it’s about. There’s a clear story and development to it. And this idea, I have a strong sense that it’s going to work. It’s tailored to my skill set. I can do A and B so why not try to do it all in one? This is a unique piece of work just because of the unity of vision throughout the whole thing.

Adam: Were you happy with the way people responded to Honored? Did you feel like you got a good reaction from that?

Jake: Definitely. Truthfully, all the stuff we put out… I’m still figuring out how to get it beyond the social media that I know.

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The commute from their full-time jobs back to their Park Slope apartment is one of the only breaks that Jake and Emily get in the day. When they arrive back home, they are greeted by their second job: producing a motion picture. Off of the bedroom is a small office. This is where their shelves of camera and sound equipment live. Propped up on the desk behind their computer is a large poster for Civil Servant, the web series written, directed, and edited by Jake (he also starred in it). Emily produced the majority of the series, co-wrote episodes with Jake, and played a supporting character. When I saw the poster, it was still wrapped in loose plastic, presumably from their move one-and-a-half weeks prior.

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Jake: This poster, to me, is a testament… this is the thing that we worked on, harder than anything. It took three years of work… the last episode was seen by like, 200 people — less than that, actually.

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Civil Servant debuted in late November of 2014. The sixth and final episode was posted in late December. It has, as of writing, 163 views on YouTube.

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Jake: Freshman year of college, I didn’t have that many film friends. But sophomore year of film school, I immediately met Emily, Martin Pohl — some of my best friends, and the funniest and smartest people that I feel like I’ve met at school. It was like an explosion. That’s the first thing about Civil Servant, is that it’s all friends. It was Emily, Marty, Paul Head, Kristen Laffey, Jake Lindeman, Trevor Silverstein, Joe Gallo, Chloe Jury-Fogel, Paul Head… I’m sure I’m forgetting people.

I wanted to do something outside of class. Civil Servant was that thing.

The thing I was most excited about was creating plot and narrative. My favorite stuff is The Sopranos, Mad Men; I love the way that really amazing Golden Age of TV type stuff uses misdirection to create seasonal arcs. They do these things where they’re planning these stories, and you don’t even realize that these stories are being developed and by the end you’re like, “Oh, it’s been all about this the whole time and actually it’s been present.” It feels true to life.

The other thing that I was excited about was working with these people who I thought were really funny. It was just so hard to do. We were doing it all guerrilla, after hours. The production value, it started to get really difficult to maintain towards the end of it. If you look at the poster, there are four directors of photography. It was just absurd.

We started filming in February of 2012. We shot it for a year and a half. Editing took a year. I was doing it, for the most part, by myself, although a few people worked on different episodes on their own. It just took a while. It became a good lesson for Howeds. I learned from my old roommate, Jason Moss, this idea of trying to preserve that feeling of a first listen or a first viewing, that feeling of immediacy when you’re responding to something, because that’s the only thing that will connect you to what a first time viewer will see. I lost that with Civil Servant. It was really hard to get it back. So I’m not editing Howeds. Joe Gallo, who edited one of the episodes of Civil Servant, is editing the whole thing.

Long form stuff… it’s hard, it’s different, when you don’t have the resources to do long form stuff. And it’s like… it’s hard not to judge things on the merit of how many Facebook Likes it gets, which is such a ridiculous, non-demonstrative way of seeing whether it’s good or not. And Civil Servant, it’s supposed to be straight narrative, and yet, it didn’t even get seen. But I don’t feel like it was unsuccessful. I don’t feel like I could really evaluate based on how many people saw it or loved it.

If it weren’t for Civil Servant, I couldn’t do Howeds.

Adam: Like you said, it’s hard to have the resources at this stage, and I wonder, in your head, what do you feel resource cramped about, and in what ways do you feel like that hampers your abilities? There are, especially with filmmaking, a lot of tools out there. I know a lot of people who do film and video stuff and they get frustrated because they think, “Oh, if I just had this camera,” or another tool, then the art would be better.

Jake: I know what you mean. Well, preface this by saying that I definitely believe that limitations set you free. In the worst case, just make whatever you’re doing a document of where you’re at. Compared to thirty or forty years ago, we have so much access to resources. You can always have more. Everybody always wants more. You just have to make it work, with whatever you have, and make the best of it. Those constraints will be a document.

The most important resource, without compare, is people. Before even going into anything else, I’m just going to harp on this for a second: Emily (and I think she can hear me right now) is God’s gift to me. Besides being my best friend and the best person I know, working with Emily has changed everything for me. Working on Howeds with Emily… we both work incredibly hard on it. It’s like we’re two heads that are constantly bouncing back and forth on all of the creative and all of the product elements. It’s amazing to be able to have that conversation outside of your own brain and to be met with someone who has a ton of their own ideas. That’s the best thing.

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Jake has reason to appreciate people as a resource; right now, none of the cast or crew of Howeds is getting paid (including Jake and Emily). All of the money is going into the production, food, transportation, etc. And all of that is very, very expensive. Jake was uncomfortable when we talked about paying people. It was obvious that he wished he had enough money to give them the salaries they deserved.

The money for Howeds has come from two sources: Jake’s own savings (it took him two years to save enough to fund one quarter of Howeds’ production) and from soliciting family and friends. When Jake and I talked, he and Emily were in the beginning stages of planning a crowdfunding campaign, which will, by the time this is published, be on Indiegogo. 

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Jake: Art is such a funny thing. Emily and I had gone to a session on fundraising in the arts, and this guy was basically saying that being nervous about asking for money is – if you go down the line – related to questioning the value of your work.

I’m definitely a believer that art should be functional. I like channeling that feeling of What is this for? What is the purpose of this?

For Howeds, I want my message to reach people who are in suburban communities. And, to sum up what the movie is about: Howeds is about how oppressed groups tend to revisit, through this “us vs. them” mentality, some of the same persecution that that they faced and project it onto others. It’s through the lens of the Jewish-American experience. Jewish kids who are teased can be xenophobic and don’t even really realize how they’re prejudiced against women or minorities. And they suffer for it. My hope is to, through this lens, create a sense of empathy for these characters and position some kind of thesis as to why this behavior goes on.

Emily and I went to Israel a month ago. I had felt for a while that Jewish-American culture was something that I didn’t feel comfortable touching with a ten-foot pole. And then I realized that, you know, I always knew that Howeds was a Jewish movie, but I sometimes felt uncomfortable, because, for me, I feel like there’s a golden rule of not writing about characters that I don’t love. Howeds is cultural criticism. After we went on Birthright (which has its own share of propaganda, but it was amazing to be in Israel), I felt more comfortable with Howeds being a Jewish movie. Cultural criticism is what Judaism is about. This is one voice moving forward Judaism. I’m not an extremely religious person, but I feel like I’m culturally Jewish and I’m proud to be culturally Jewish. I feel like being Jewish connects me to the world rather than separates me. I think, whether you’re atheist or religious, everybody believes that the world is bigger than themselves. So, to me, it gave me this sense of purpose. Howeds is a Jewish movie, it’s a criticism, it’s one voice in this movement, and hopefully that will have a functional effect.

I’ve been working on a song called “I Belong,” and it’s about my realization that, for me, I don’t feel anymore that art is a vanity project. I used to feel bad when I thought, “All I want to do is make my own projects.” But I know that I belong, I know that my ideas and my messages, even if people are not clamoring for them, need to come out, because I deem them important. Even if it’s just my voice in a crowd of voices.

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With some of the same friends who helped make Civil Servant and are helping make Howeds, Jake and Emily made Key Party, a short comedic film, for the 2013 Tisch 48-Hour Film Festival. Key Party is not only funny: the character beats feel sincere even when they’re completely absurd. It was, to put it in Jake’s words, “lightning in a bottle,” a complete amalgamation of the talents of those involved.

Jake has a complicated relationship with comedy. “When I was in elementary school, I felt like my way of getting in with people who didn’t really care about the real me was through making jokes.” That feeling hasn’t really left. Whenever he posts a new What’s Good? video – a series of shorts where he asks various people “What’s good?” – people seem “more responsive to [him] playing a character that makes a fool of myself" than to his more serious work.

And yet, he keeps coming back to it, posting new What’s Good? videos frequently enough to keep the series active. Howeds will have humor as well, as did Civil Servant before it. Humor, Jake tells me, is just another human emotion. For a young filmmaker struggling to make people care about his art, it may also be an easy way to connect to people, to make his work accessible. What I imagine keeps the elementary school boy inside of Jake awake at night is the idea that they won’t stick around to care about anything else.

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Adam: I want to go back, all the way to Shofar Away, which I really enjoyed. Knowing what you just said about Howeds and the Jewish-American experience, how did you think about Shofar Away at the time? And now that you have the further realization of what you understand about yourself and how the Jewish-American experience affects your film output, what do you feel about that? Give me a before and after.

Jake: Well, I didn’t want to make that movie. It was for my Intermediate Class, at Tisch, and I wanted to do the final episode of Civil Servant as my project. Emily and I, we had the same professor. His name is Boris Frumin, and I feel like I learned more from him than any other teacher I’ve ever had. It wasn’t fun being in his class… he was very aggressive. He’s Latvian, always said, “No, no, no.” At the time, I could do a much better Boris impression.

He would talk through your movies while they showed, and to some degree, I felt like he was a little detached. But for the most part, he was ridiculously incisive with his criticism. He could immediately diagnose the problems that you had on set by looking at your final footage. He was just really thoughtful. He connected me to the history of cinema. There are just some truths that are eternal. This dude changed my conception of thinking about film. Before Boris, I thought film was about interesting dialogue, character beats, and story things. Boris taught me that everything is blocking and staging and everything else in the film is an extension of that. I’m forever indebted to him for that.

Boris was preaching, “Do things that are original, do things that are based on a specific type of experience,” he preached cultural stuff and interesting props. So that was it. Let’s track this shofar.

I don’t like doing things for class. Whatever your heart desires, it’s being warped by this craft exercise. I’m a big believer in learning by doing. But if you set up a craft exercise as a craft exercise, immediately there’s some separation. You don’t have truly full stakes. I feel like I need to have completely full stakes in it for me to get the lesson learned, even if it ends up being a failure. That’s the only way I’m going to try to my hardest, if I really feel like it’s full stakes. When I fail, it will still be a craft exercise, so why just make it a craft exercise? I know I’m going to fail at some point and learn something for the future, so why not do it with my whole heart?

It was based on my friend Jake’s story — they were both at my Rosh Hashanah dinner and Jake, the whole time, hid upstairs watching football on his computer and my other friend, Jason, jokingly flirted with one of my cousins the entire time. I thought it would be funny to combine it all into one thing. And, to me, connected to your question, I think Shofar Away was about feeling like an outsider in my own culture. I feel conflicted about Judaism, but I feel proud to be culturally Jewish and I don’t feel like my beliefs as a Jew are much different from anyone else’s beliefs in any other religion. I like the idea of connecting to everyone and everything, or striving to, rather than focusing on points where we’re different. Jewish just happens to be my identity. And I’m proud of it. That’s how I feel now, at least, but looking back… a lot of it was like, yeah, it was kind of growing pains.

I had a sixteen minute cut of it, originally, and I was I thought it was an opus. I was like, “This is amazing!” I brought it into class and thought, “I’m going to blow minds.” And then Boris shit on it. He told me to cut half the scenes and he told me that most of the scenes were undershot. I shot every scene in one take. I thought it was going to be a cool conceit, and it worked sometimes but it didn’t work as the whole thing.

Then I edited it too much, according to his notes. I got obsessed about it. I would send a cut to him after class was over and he would send me ten notes and I would do all of them and I did that over and over again. There’s a moment, in one of the cuts, it’s like a Psycho moment, a kind of Hitchcock or Kubrick thing, when he picks up the shofar, the film goes into slow motion and it gets really serious and dramatic, like he’s doing something really awful. When I showed it to the class, that was the part where everybody laughed. I wished I’d kept it in, but Boris said it was stylistically inconsistent. Marty gave me the note that I should’ve just listened to the laughter — if an audience is reacting, go for it! I wish I had done that differently. I feel like the climax of it is very downplayed.

Adam: To me, actually, that was one of the strengths of it.

Jake: Aaaah, that’s interesting.

Adam: I feel like the entire story was incredibly downplayed, and yet at the end of it, you feel, watching it, like the outsider. You feel like you are not of this world. I felt vaguely uncomfortable the entire time I was watching it, in a good way. I felt that I supposed to feel that way.

Jake: Yeah. *laughs* All my mom’s Jewish friends, when they saw it, were like, “Oh, we like Jakey’s stuff but I didn’t get Shofar Away.” I mean, I’m happy that you liked it. I felt, I guess, looking back, I don’t think that fondly on it. Some of the jokes are just convoluted. I’m happy I made it. Personally, I think Howeds is a step above. Not that there is a better or worse, but those were just different times.

Adam: It’s a document of the moment.

Jake: Exactly.

Adam: You should look at it with fresh eyes, though.

Jake: Yeah. *laughs* Yeah, yeah.

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You can view all of Jake’s films and keep up with new projects, including Howeds, on his website. 

Under her influences: Meghan Irving talks about her inspiration

After years of honing her voice in talent shows and in cover songs uploaded to YouTube, Meghan Irving is ready to make music her life. On her recently released EP Under The Influence, Irving sings "I don't want to wait no more." While it's addressed to a lover, one can easily imagine her singing to the Gods of music, telling them that she is here and she is ready to sing.

Meghan Irving's Debut EP written and performed by Meghan Irving and produced by Ez-Rah.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

What artists or albums influenced your sound and songwriting?

I have so many different artists and styles of music that I love, but some of my biggest influences would have to be Michael Jackson, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Whitney Houston, and Sia. Sia in particular is a big inspiration when it comes to songwriting. She writes catchy songs but they still have meaning and are relatable, which is something that I try to do. My writing is very personal, but I also love clever writing, and lines that make you go "Ooh that's good" or "that's a clever line.” The type of lyrics people get tattooed or put on a poster, or the type that just make you go “Yes! I've been through that, I know what she's talking about." I put a lot of thought into what I want to say in each song.

Vocally, Whitney and Christina are just incomparable and are two singers I've always been inspired by. Both of them are versatile and have very diverse audiences and their songs can be heard through various musical outlets. I never want to be pigeonholed into a particular genre, and that idea has definitely influenced my sound. I like all types of music so I try to create music for all types of people that can be played in various places.

Overall, the ability to convey emotion through my writing and my voice and make people feel and relate to something, and at the same time have songs that are memorable is the ultimate goal.

You wrote your first song at age 11. Who and what inspired your early songwriting?

I remember the first song I ever wrote was called "Fly.” It was quite a while ago but I vaguely remember it being about following your dreams and trying your hardest. It wasn't really that good, but it's the thought that counts, right?!

In the beginning I was mostly inspired by movies. I would watch different films and write songs to go along with what happened in the movie. My friends and everything that was happening in our lives at the time also inspired me. I would also just make things up sometimes and create stories about things that I found interesting.

The lyrics came pretty naturally for me. Creating melodies was the hard part. When I was younger and just started to write songs I would use other songs I knew as a template and write my own lyrics. I knew that in reality it didn't work that way, so fast-forward to my teenage years, when I finally began developing my own melodies.

From your first song up until now, can you pinpoint a moment that changed the way you write songs?

When I went away to college, my songs really changed. That's when I was truly out on my own and just gained a lot of life experience and went through some crap. You know how they say pain usually inspires the best art? It's weird how true that is! I also met a lot of new people during that time who introduced me to new artists and new songs. Listening to new music is always good influence. I'm not sure if that necessarily changed how I write songs; I'm still inspired by my life and what's going on around me. But it definitely changed the quality of my songs. They're much more raw, more relatable. I think I kept it a bit more surface-level before and wrote about how I thought I'd feel in certain situations. Now that I've experienced more, I can write from the heart.

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You can read more about Meghan on her website and you can follow her on Twitter.

"I'm a person, not a robot." - an interview with Erika Boudreau-Barbee

Erika Boudreau-Barbee started her training as a child in Oregon. After graduating with a BFA in Dance from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2013, Erika went on to produce new works in Germany and Spain, as well as performing in Ensemble Dance. For this interview, Thomas Baldwin sat down with Erika to talk about her residencies in Germany and Spain, the work that came out of them, and her artistic process.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Thomas Baldwin: So you studied at NYU for three years. Did you go to Berlin that summer?

Erika Boudreau-Barbee: In Summer 2013 I went to India. Not for art, just to go. I backpacked around Nepal and India for five weeks with my friend Jay, who graduated with me. We both said, "Let's go!" That was life changing. There was never another time in my life where I felt so many things at the same time. After that, I came back for a week to pick up a suitcase and then I went to Germany. It was quick! I was in Germany for three months.

Thomas: What do you think you got out of your trip to India? Anything that really stuck with you?

Erika: Things still resonate. We spent two weeks in the north and two weeks in the south and we joined up with a group, so we weren't all by ourselves.

Thomas: That's good. [laughs]

Erika: It definitely was. [laughs] Our guide was fantastic. He took us to tiny, tiny villages where you've never seen such poverty, and they've never seen white people. I think in Germany it influenced my work. It didn't later in Spain because India was so far removed at that point. Many of my thoughts were about poverty and about the women and color. You have to be incredibly present to travel through India. There is no way to be there and not be present. You would just disappear. In that respect it came through in my work, Start Over, with the paint that I did at the gallery in Berlin. Originally that idea was in born in New York, but then I went to India and it changed entirely.

Thomas: Those influences weren't obvious for me.

Erika: Right. Most of my work is like that. The things that go into making the final product are not are removed from the final product. Many of the phrases for I Bit the Dust were from poetry I had written and didn't relate at all to my concept. But then you manipulate them and you make it work with your idea. It's sort of strange. Then, of course, there are pieces that I do where I have an object, such as the work with the wooden frame [Dear Jayne]. There's an analogy of body frame and wood frame. That's it.

Thomas: Oh really? My interpretation was coming from an art historical background. What exactly was the audio track on Dear Jayne?

Erika: The audio was a YouTube video that I stripped and cut apart. Then, I added in a bunch of sounds of tools not original to the video.

Thomas: What was the video about?

Erika: It was about constructing a wooden frame. I just made it more destructive. I wanted to destroy the structure of the frame, of me and the frame.

Thomas: To me it looked more like canvas stretchers than a traditional frame. So I was looking at it sculpturally or painterly.

Erika: And I think that goes with it. I was comparing myself to a frame. I was trying to find ways I could fit in it to make a photo or to make a sculpture. It's very similar.

Thomas: I have very few reference points of dance, but it reminded me a lot of Yvonne Rainer and the work she did at Judson Memorial Church. She was dating Robert Morris at the time and a lot of the works they did at the time involved the dancers interacting with Morris's sculptures, which had human-proportioned dimensions. And the frame in your work is about a man's height. Especially later where you're stretched out on the floor, it looked painful.

Erika: [laughs] It was!

Thomas: That was serious commitment. It reminded me of Pollock's paintings and the idea of horizontal gesture as action. Did that influence you at all?

Erika: No, but I've actually used [Pollock] as a reference with another composer before. We had a couple composers we were working with on a project, and we asked them to make the music like a Pollock painting. He looked at me and was like, "What does that mean?"

Thomas: What did you like about living and working in Berlin?

Erika: It was strange because it was the first time I was out of school and I was like, "Whoa, I have to do this all myself!" I liked the opportunity that they gave. It was a lot of space and I created a lot of work there. I screwed around with film; I did whatever I felt like; I painted a lot; made some dance work, of course. The city itself is very free. But I don't speak German at all, so the people I talked to were people all our age. People would get frustrated at me if I didn't speak German, which was all the time. I liked the freedom and I got to travel. I went to Hamburg and I went to Dresden. I like Germany in general. The landscape is beautiful.

Thomas: How did you get connected to the residency?

Erika: I found it online and I applied. It was a lot smaller than the residency in Berlin. In Berlin there were about 12 people at a time, but this one had only five.

Thomas: Only five?

Erika: Well, when I got there, there were seven, because two were couples. When I left there were three. We were in a tiny beautiful house in the middle of nowhere.

Thomas: What was the institution that sponsored you?

Erika: There's a couple that runs the residency. The wife is from New York and her husband went to grad school at NYU, and he's from this small town in Spain, with only 3,500 people.

Thomas: That's it? Wow.

Erika: I think there were more people in my high school. But they moved back and they thought, hey, let's run a residency program here. I made a lot of friends with farmers. I would go out and help them in the fields. No one spoke English. Some of the kids, maybe 12 years old, could speak a little English, because they were learning it in school, but I met the English teacher at the school and she didn’t speak English! My Spanish got pretty good. I would talk to those farmers for hours. The couple took half of a convent. Half is still active and the other half is for studio space. That's where I did Posting and that's where I did From the top - the one where I'm hanging like Jesus.

Thomas: Did the nuns know about that?

Erika: No, it was a closed convent. They didn't come out to see. I liked the convent. It was a very peaceful place to work, unlike Berlin. You would go to the convent late at night and it would be just stars and silence. You could hear crickets. It was a little creepy. I was there for two months and I made a ton of work, because what else are you going to do?

Thomas: I was going to say it sounds like a good place to go and get shit done.

Erika: Exactly. You wake up and say, "What am I going to do today? I've got nothing to do except make art and drink wine."

Thomas: What should we talk about first regarding this residency? Do you want to talk about Posting?

Erika: Posting was just fun. I like to play on objects. This one was the only one I recorded. I just climbed up the ladder. The only goal that I had was to make a different shape each time.

Thomas: This one made me think - going back to Modernism – about Minimalist seriality and methodical process. You would go up on one post and then go up on the next post and so on.

Erika: I wanted it to be very patterned. It was just a task, and I make a lot of “just task” work.

Thomas: I noticed that in I Bit the Dust. There were movements in it that were task oriented. There was a part where you walked mid-stage and then walked back and forward, without any choreographed steps, and placing the clay?

Erika: Mineral dust. I work with a lot of unsafe materials. [laughs]

Thomas: When you threw it all down in the center and that cloud came up, I was so worried. I thought, "How much of this is she inhaling? Does she stop in the middle and hack up dust?"

Erika: I would rehearse with a mask on, but I didn't want to wear one in the show. For some reason, I want to perform this in a space here in NYC and make the audience wear masks. I think that sounds fun.

Thomas: You could probably find a warehouse in Bushwick to do it in. I'm sure.

Erika: It's fun to talk with you, because you have so much other knowledge. When I talk to some of my other friends they say "oh that's cool," but they can't articulate. You actually know art.

Thomas: But you realize that I've actually shied away from speaking formalistically about dance, because I have no understanding of formal content in dance. That's why if we talk about Tolerance, well, it's completely different from your other work.

Erika: It's concept-based. It didn't start out that way.

Thomas: People were so polite in the video, braking their cars. They probably saw the video camera.

Erika: There were people in the house next door and they said they wanted some beer, too. This idea came about late at night at the convent. I wanted to do things they don't like there. I would fill up a glass of wine and take off an article of clothing, and fill up a glass of wine and take off an article of clothing.

Thomas: You were intentionally antagonistic?

Erika: Yeah. [laughs] For some reason that idea is how Tolerance started. I know it seems far from that point, but I would change one thing about it and another thing would change, and it would switch and grow and it became this, which is much clearer and direct. It had a point. My friend in the video, Juan, was an intern at the residency. He was a nice guy. We sat there for two hours, which went by very quickly. My original idea was that we would just sit and not speak, but the more beers you drink… we would start cracking up, which was incredibly inappropriate. I wanted to continue it as a series. I just did it with my friend at Union Square Park during the protests regarding the Eric Garner decision. It only lasted an hour, because there were so many tweets coming in. We couldn’t do it anymore, we ran out of beer! It was fun, but it's harder to do here since we have laws that you are not allowed to drink in a park. We hid our drink in a McDonald's cup. You can look at it so many different ways. Some of my friends who saw Tolerance were totally disgusted by it, which was perfectly fine and acceptable. The other half got it.

Thomas: One thing I wasn't sure you thought of was the relationship of news consumption and alcohol consumption. The German word rausch means drunk or intoxicated, but it also means inability to take everything in, to be overwhelmed. I thought there might be a relation between the amount of information coming in and the inability to process it and the feeling of being intoxicated. Being overfull of alcohol or devastating information. I liked how simple it was and I thought it sent a good message.

Erika: That's all it needed. It didn't need anything else, but that.

Thomas: How many did you drink in two hours?

Erika: Five, I think.

Thomas: That's not so bad

Erika: You would think, except we were chugging it. For the first half-hour we had only one, and then the tweets started coming in. The timing was not right. When we did the one in Union Square, we had five in an hour; they were coming in that quickly.

Thomas: You've got to pick your topics more carefully!

Erika: Well, that's the news part of it. It's the top story of social media at the time of intolerance. So when it switches, then I'll do another one. This one was overwhelming, so I had to do it.

Thomas: Chronologically after that, did you do I Bit the Dust or From the top?

Erika: I Bit the Dust. I worked on these at the same time, because I had to paint the backdrop for From the top. It took some time so I would go work and dance and then I'd go paint a little.

Thomas: You were suspending yourself by your arms and your waist, and the noose around your neck was just for show?

Erika: There was no noose around my neck. It's around my shoulders. That would be really intense. When I rigged it the first time, I was just hanging by my shoulders and my wrists. The guy who ran the program said, "No, we're putting a harness on you," which was funny, because the harness was tied to the same rope. It didn't make it any more safe. It made it more comfortable, so I didn't mind. I was only up there for a couple of minutes and I got the worst cuts.

Thomas: Who threw the balloons at you? Random passersby or people in the program?

Erika: People that came to the event.

Thomas: Did you choose wine for the balloons because of the convent or a connection to the Eucharist?

Erika: I chose wine because of the blood of Christ, and black balloons for sin and death. Everything was symbolic. This was the piece I proposed and was accepted into the program for. The other stuff I did for fun.

Thomas: You’re pretty high up there. That is not a low wall!

Erika: I'm about five feet up.

Thomas: What were you trying to convey? Did you feel that you were successful?

Erika: Well, I thought it was successful for an experiment. I didn't know how people were going to react; I don't know what people are thinking. The balloons were supposed to pop when they hit the rock wall, but they didn't. When I tested it I filled it with water, but when I filled it with wine, I blew up the balloon a little. I threw it against a tree and it popped fine. When it came time for the show, they wouldn't pop. I loved that, though! It made it another game. I like irony in my work, and you can find some in all my work. Kids came and were throwing them as hard as they can. My sister came and she ripped her balloon with her teeth and then threw it at me. All the other people caught on and followed, but the kids kept trying to get their balloons to pop on the wall. I think it was successful, because it was unpredictable. I think it went better than I expected. You can see here what I was anchored to.

Thomas: A burning barrel full of rocks?

Erika: [laughs] I was thinking, "How am I going to do this?" We tied a rope around an iron rod, put the rod in the barrel and threw rocks and sand in the barrel. The rope that held my arm was supported by just a nail. What was cool was that people saw the rigging as they walked in. They probably didn't realize what it was as they came in, but when they left they probably saw it and thought, "That girl is psycho!"

Thomas: And there was a ladder to get you up and down?

Erika: Yeah. I climbed the ladder, tied myself up and in and someone came and removed the ladder.

Thomas: That's intense. When you were up there did you talk or were you silent?

Erika: I was silent, until a kid hit me in the face. I laughed a little, which was fine. That was the weird thing. The more I do performances, I learn that it is ok to react. In performance, it's part of the work. In dance you cannot react. You fall on your butt, you get up and start dancing again. I much prefer performance for that, because I'm a person, not a robot. I was just letting it happen.

Thomas: How do you think From the top relates to I Bit the Dust? Do you think they relate?

Erika: In my mind they were totally separate, but I do find a lot of similarities between them. I find more similarities between the piece I did in Berlin [Residual] and I Bit the Dust. They are both very primitive. So is Sun Salutation. I was thinking, "Let's go back. Man is made from dust." Most of the material for I Bit the Dust came from an improv. I spent a lot of time doing improv, and I would record my improvs. I would look back and think, "That moment worked. That moment could be expanded upon. What are you doing?" [laughs] Usually I would keep those. And I also added lots of task-based movement. The tasks in the improv were very sense-based. That’s where putting the dust on my face and smelling it came from. I did not lick it, because it is mineral dust. Most of the improv work would be the in-between stuff that's more dance-like.

Thomas: There's a dance move in there that looks like breaking character.

Erika: Those are the only parts that really came with sound. I would play the chorus of Queen's “Another One Bites The Dust.” For the soundtrack I used Cliff Martinez.

Thomas: Like the Drive soundtrack?

Erika: I used everything of his but the Drive soundtrack. It's too well-known now. Some of his earlier works are really wonderful. I stripped his tracks, added sound to some of them, and put the Queen chorus into it.

Thomas: I thought your dance looked like pop when Queen came on.

Erika: I was grooving! It's a switch, because it's a dramatic shift in music. It was the only time I was in sync with the music.

Thomas: I thought that, when the piece reached its climax, your movements became more in rhythm with the music. Especially with that mousey step where your hands are in front and you’re making many little steps on your tiptoes. That one point seemed in rhythm. Were you introducing that step earlier in the piece to set up a motif that would make sense later on in the piece?

Erika: With most of the movements I create them separately. I put them together and I practice and I see where the happy accidents are. I see what worked well, what I’ll keep, what I’ll switch. At the end where there is a climax and it is more light-hearted, that should all come together. I like when my work is contradictory and it doesn't make sense when I'm doing it and they merge later on. I'll do several movements where movements won’t make sense the first four times you see it, but the fifth time it does. Or that time where it makes sense will be in the middle sometimes. Generally speaking, movements are created before their order is determined. I record and look back and figure out the order afterwards.

Thomas: Especially towards the beginning of I Bit the Dust, where you had the windmill movement of your arms and your hands, it reminded me a lot of Merce Cunningham. The Brooklyn Museum has a video from the early 80's of him dancing in front of a green screen, a new technology at that time. He's doing a fairly stationary dance with a lot of those small hand movements, while the green screen behind him shows the ocean, the road. To us it looks dated to us, but it must've been innovative at the time.

Erika: He did a lot of work with chance, which I appreciate, but at the same time I don't. I like chance and I improv frequently.

Thomas: But it seems that chance is not a part of your choreography.

Erika: I find that I make better work when I make the decisions. I think people need to know that a work was made using chance in order to appreciate its role in the choreography. I saw a piece by him at BAM recently and one piece was all chance. The piece, the costumes, the set, all decided by chance. But what if you made a choice? Would it have been better? I have a weird relationship with chance. When I did Sun Salutation I didn't plan where I went. I didn't have a solid plan. So I guess chance goes both ways. But I make choices, and sometimes those choices take months to make. I Bit the Dust took a few weeks to make. I did it in August.

Thomas: Where are you in this piece?

Erika: I'm in an empty room at the convent. I don't know what it was used for in the past, but the roof is beautiful, all wood. There is a lot of space to perform there. When I showed it at our show, I had I Bit the Dust playing on a small TV in that room, but I blasted the music so that it was overwhelming when you approached it. The piece that I submitted for my upcoming second residency in Berlin will be crated similarly to I Bit the Dust, where the music will not correspond with the movement. I'm using a lot of text, such as projecting text on my body... I keep a journal and I write and record my influences. The ideas spark at random. Some manifest quickly and some take some time to be sure that they're something that I want to be seen.

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You can find more of Erika Boudrea-Barbee's work on her website.