[writing]

[Written January 2024]

In his 1957 lecture The Creative Act, Marcel Duchamp identified the "art coefficient" as the gap between an artist’s intention for a work and that work’s ultimate reception by the viewer. Duchamp described this discrepancy as "representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and what he did realize." By identifying this gap, Duchamp calls into question the limitations of the artist’s intentionality as it relates to how their work is interpreted by the general public, scrutinizing the extent to which the artist is socially permitted to intervene in the audience’s interpretation. Delivered in 1957 amongst uncertainty regarding the future of modern art, Duchamp conceptualized this future as one negotiating this line between intention and reception. Despite not being labeled as "modern art" at the time, articulations of Duchamp’s provocation were already in progress through the incorporation of chance into event frameworks within the work of John Cage and George Brecht. Responding to the ideas raised in The Creative Act years before its delivery, these artists adapted Duchamp’s concept of the readymade to their individual ends and collapsed intention and reception into two facets of the same artistic experience in the process. I argue that both Cage and Brecht employ and expand upon Duchamp’s concept of the readymade to incorporate chance operations and the randomness of everyday life into their respective event frameworks. In Cage’s 4’33” (1952) and Brecht’s Three Chair Events (1961), both artists suspend authorial control to allow the randomness of the viewer’s immediate response to the work to engender the work itself. In 4’33”, Cage utilizes silence to frame the myriad of random, supposedly "non-musical" sounds made within the auditorium as a kind of found, readymade soundscape. In Three Chair Event, Brecht employs the readymade event score as a constant variable that incites the randomness of audience response as the score is read and considered intellectually by the viewer. While Cage’s incorporation of chance into his work expanded the readymade to a durational event, Brecht’s event scores expanded this notion even further by making the durational readymade event repeatable and indeterminately specific to each viewer’s idiosyncratic artistic experience.

In 1914, Duchamp conceptualized the readymade as the transformation of everyday, ‘readymade’ objects into art through their selection and presentation within a gallery setting. Employing such items as a bottlerack, bicycle wheel, or most famously in 1917, a urinal, Duchamp critiqued the notion of artistic taste and valuation by reducing the artist’s act to an object’s mere selection and contextualization. In this way, the true workmanship of the artist is centered not upon the form or content of the object being presented, but rather the gesture that dictates its presentation whatsoever. By removing an object from its utilitarian, quotidian context, the object "suddenly loses all significance and is converted into an object existing within a vacuum, into a thing without any embellishment." (Paz, 24) In this way, Duchamp’s gesture critiques the uneven relationship between value and labor present within art criticism. Through the reduction of labor to the selection of an object or a group of objects, the readymade gesture was instantaneous and consists of the moment of the object’s selection. However, nearly four decades later, through the translation of the readymade gesture into the realm of music and performance, Cage first expanded upon the Duchampian gesture by making it durational, while embracing chance operations in the process.

Cage’s 4’33” (1952) translates Duchamp’s readymade gesture by expanding beyond the elevation of an everyday object into a piece of art, instead recognizing "random" sounds made within a certain duration as music, or more generally: as art. First performed in Woodstock, New York in 1952, Cage conceptualized 4’33” as a silent music piece in which any sound made by the audience within that four minute and 33 second time frame constitutes the work itself. Having considered a silent work since 1947, Cage finally created the work after being inspired by the first presentation of Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings in 1951. (Harren, 49) Whereas Rauschenberg’s white canvases drew focus to the effects of light, shadow, and dust rendered on the painting’s surface by whichever room in which they were presented, Cage’s silent piece aimed to apply that reconfiguration of viewer attention to an aural register in the context of a traditionally musical setting, like a concert hall. By embracing the indeterminacy of sound produced by the audience, Cage’s intended outcome for the work and its reception by the audience unfold simultaneously within the work’s duration. In this way, Cage’s authorship of 4’33” is limited to the definition of the work’s temporal boundaries. As follows, the audience’s active experience of the work simultaneously constitutes its authorship as well. Cage’s auditory inactivity activates the audience’s participation in the work while simultaneously legitimizing the randomness of that auditory participation through the work’s contextualization. Just like a urinal in Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) can be interpreted as a work of art due to its placement within a gallery, all sound, no matter how unplanned, made within Cage’s "silent" symphony can be read as music due to the contextualization of its presentation within a concert hall before an audience.

While the limited durational quality of the work prohibits a direct experience by contemporary audiences, 4’33” predominantly exists today through reenactment recordings and three forms of graphic notion: traditional staff notation, proportional notation, and text. (Harren, 48) In one regard, Cage’s silent symphony acts as a rejection of the traditional Western forms of musical graphic notation by dignifying sounds as music that could not be written down on the traditional 5-line staff. Instead, Cage argued that sound should be measured in five acoustic qualities: frequency (pitch), duration, amplitude (volume), timbre, and morphology, with 4’33” amplifying the foundational nature of duration. (Harren, 33) What’s more, Cage’s embrace of the indeterminacy of sound made by the audience not traditionally defined as music rejects a systemization of graphic notation that works to limit risk and differentiation across the translation of the musical composition from author to interpreter. (Harren, 41) Barring the work’s temporal boundaries, each performance of the work is different because each audience’s experience, and thus the authorship of the work itself, is idiosyncratic to the performance in which it occurs. Despite predating the term’s coinage, 4’33” can be understood as bridging the gap of Duchamp’s art coefficient due to the work’s position as "the very marker of the gap between intention and realization." (Robinson, 82) What’s more, due to the work’s enduring material existence in the form of graphic notation, the (albeit blank) score acts as a kind of readymade experience perpetually awaiting an audience to activate it with their indeterminate response, intimating the event scores of Cage’s student George Brecht.

Years after the first performance of 4’33”, Cage’s interactions with Brecht, through experimental music compositions and event scores conceived in Cage’s course at the New School, would return translations of Duchamp’s readymade gesture from the context of musical performance back to the realm of avant garde visual art where the gesture first originated. Before joining Cage’s course, the first five years of Brecht’s artistic production included Chance Paintings made through indeterminate processes, as inspired by the incorporation of chance in the work of the late Jackson Pollock. In 1957, Brecht compiled his research into chance operations in Chance-Imagery, an essay tracking the history of the incorporation of chance in art from Dada and the Surrealists to Pollock, who died the year of its writing. (Robinson, 16) Chance-Imagery demonstrates the extent to which Brecht studied Duchamp’s readymade gesture as a model for applying chance operations in visual art before any close interaction with Cage. However, Brecht later resonated with the Duchampian influence on Cage’s work, noting Cage’s appropriation of the Duchampian gesture: "Cage uses ambient sounds like readymades." (Brecht, 129-131) Having only recently met, Brecht sent Cage Chance-Imagery in 1957, later being invited to join Cage’s Experimental Composition class at the New School, attending in 1958 and 1959. (Robinson, 84-85) Beginning with experimental musical compositions contextualized by Cage’s musical background, Brecht’s work in the class would eventually become legible within an avant garde visual art and performance context. Drip Music (Drip Event) (1959-1962) constituted Brecht's first major event score in this transition. Similar to a musical score’s allowance for repeated performances of the same composition, Brecht’s event scores ensured a reproducible readymade experience while maintaining indeterminacy through the response of the viewer.

Presented as a part of Environments, Situations, Spaces, a group show at Martha Jackson Gallery in April 1961, Three Chair Events (1961) realized the full potential of Brecht’s event scores as an extrapolation of Duchamp’s readymade into a repeatable experience ultimately realized by the randomness of its audience’s reaction. (Robinson, 93) In the work, Brecht provided visitors an event score with the title of the work followed by three bullet points stating: "Sitting on a black chair. Occurrence. Yellow Chair. (Occurrence.) On (or near) a white chair. Occurrence." In the gallery, Brecht lit a white chair under a spotlight. In spite of what the event score might suggest, Brecht positioned the black chair in the bathroom and the yellow chair on the sidewalk outside the gallery’s front entrance. Whereas the white chair received "art-like attention," visitors threw their coats and handbags on the black chair, and the yellow chair served as a sitting place for Claes Oldenburg’s mother. (Robinson, 56) Three Chair Events demonstrated Brecht’s first experience placing everyday objects within the vicinity of one of his event scores. In the process, this relationship between score and object reveals how the event framework activates viewer’s expectations to be presumably confirmed by objects within the gallery context. Echoing the Duchampian gesture, the true contextualizing power of the gallery setting is revealed when these viewer expectations are disappointed, dignifying the objects within it as art and reducing all those outside as quotidian junk.

The event score in Three Chair Events acts as a readymade experience in its establishment of inflated expectations for the viewer that are detached from the material objects presented in the gallery before them. By titling the work Three Chair Event and listing three different chairs on the event score, but only providing one white chair spotlit in the gallery, the graphic notation of those two omitted objects are defined by Rosalind Krauss as "shifters," in that they are linguistic signs only deemed significant by their emptiness, or lack of a referent. (Krauss, 197) By recognizing the chairs’ material absence, the viewer assigns the event score meaning that it would not otherwise contain without their readership and contemplation. As stated by Julia Robinson, "The score’s material object (or referent) is never completed, or depicted, by the artist; it is supplied by the reader, each time it is read." (96) While the score is a consistent variable authored by Brecht, Three Chair Event is incomplete without a viewer to read it, thus providing an intellectual referent to the two chairs omitted from the gallery. As follows, Brecht incorporates chance into both the authorship and reception of the work by authorizing the viewer’s response that is as random and unpredictable as the viewer themselves. In this way, the black and yellow chair visualized in the viewer’s head is just as much a part of the work as the white chair lit before them. Whereas Cage’s readymade soundscape could only be experienced communally among an audience, Brecht’s reproducible readymade experience takes the Duchampian gesture even further by making it specific to each individual viewer responding to it. What’s more, akin to Cage’s own response to the Duchampian "art coefficient," Brecht’s framework of the "event" "gave a name to the incalculable space between the maker and the receiver of a work of art, designating it as an open field of experience." (Robinson, 18)

In 4’33” and Three Chair Events, Cage and Brecht extrapolate on Duchamp’s readymade gesture by sacrificing their own authorship in favor of the randomness of the outside world, most clearly formulated through the audience’s experience. In both works, Cage and Brecht’s subjective authorship are limited to their scores which incite indeterminate responses from the audience in the form of their experience. In 4’33”, Cage incorporated chance operations into his experimental compositions by suspending all authorship beyond the duration of the piece itself, allowing the viewer to identify meaning (or meaninglessness) in the randomness of sounds made inadvertently by their fellow audience members. As Cage’s Student, Brecht’s Three Chair Events expanded upon this Duchampian adaptation using event scores to highlight the contextualizing power of the gallery setting and the interpretive possibilities of an audience’s expectations when betrayed by the art objects before them. By incorporating chance within the authorship of their work, Cage and Brecht conceptualized a future of modern art following Pollock’s death and its ensuing uncertainty. Instead of avoiding the gap of Duchamp’s "art coefficient," Cage and Brecht responded to the provocation by making that gap between artist’s intention and viewer reception nonexistent.

Works Cited

Brecht, George, Notebook IV: September 1959 to March 1969, vol. IV of Notebooks I-VII, ed. Dieter Daniels and Hermann Braun, (Cologne: Walther König, 1991-2005), 129-131

Duchamp, Marcel, ‘The Creative Act’, lecture transcript in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 77-78

Harren, Natilee, ‘Diagramming Form, from Graphic Notation to the Fluxus Event Score’, in Fluxus forms: scores, multiples, and the eternal network, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 27-70

Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Notes on the Index: Part I’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993)

Paz, Octavio, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, (New York: The Viking Press, 1978)

Robinson, Julia, ‘From Abstraction to Model: George Brecht's Events and the Conceptual Turn in Art of the 1960s’, October, 127 (Winter 2009), 77-103

––––, ‘In the Event of George Brecht’, in George Brecht : events : eine Heterospektive = a heterospective, ed. Alfred M. Fischer, (Cologne: Walther König, 2005), 16-21

––––, ‘The Mandate of Readymade and Score’, in George Brecht : events : eine Heterospektive = a heterospective, ed. Alfred M. Fischer, (Cologne: Walther König, 2005), 52-57

[written October 2023]

Marina Abramović performed Rhythm 0 in the Studio Morra gallery in Naples in 1974. In the performance, Abramović provided strict instructions to the audience, stating: 

There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.

Performance.

I am the object...

During this period I take full responsibility.

Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am)

The breadth of objects and their potential uses upon Abramović ranged from the sensual to the deadly: a feather boa, grapes, wine, razor blades, knives, a loaded pistol. The audience consisting of art world insiders and ‘random outsiders’ brought in from the Neapolitan street fulfilled Abramović’s wishes to push her personal limits. However, this audience ultimately factionalized among themselves due to contention about what those exact limits should be, and what right they, as an audience, have to push them. In analyzing Rhythm 0, I will demonstrate the participatory extent of performance by negotiating how Abramovic scrutinizes and inverts the traditional social contract of passive audience and active performer. By performing extreme passivity, Abramovic allows the parameters of the social contract to be determined solely by the participation and self-regulation of the audience. What’s more, by removing any traces of personal subjectivity and extending her bodily agency to include any potential audience interaction, I argue that the only identity Abramović performs in Rhythm 0 is that which is assigned to her through audience participation. In reaction to Abramović distancing herself from the audience in terms of identity and bodily agency, the participatory actions of Rhythm 0’s audience reveal how community is constituted through the enforcement of conformity, and thus the elimination of the other.

Despite much of the piece existing today in anecdotes, props utilized, and archival photography, surviving photographs of the performance convey much of Abramović’s original intention. One way archival photography captures Rhythm 0’s key aspects is by picturing how the audience configured Abramović’s identity through her appearance: writing on her body in lipstick or cutting off her clothes. What’s more, these photographs capture several of the more ephemeral interactions: Abramović being physically moved around the room or kissed. Abramović’s objectification is perhaps even enhanced when perceived through photography due to the performance’s mitigation through an additional layer of representation. Building upon these existing resources, the present day viewer can extrapolate on the extent to which Rhythm 0’s audience participation constituted the performance itself.

By inviting audience interaction, Abramović’s Rhythm 0 drew attention to the traditional demarcations of the social transaction between audience and performer, and more broadly between viewer and art object. Abramović first scrutinized the social contract by upending it altogether: inverting the traditional passive audience/active performer dynamic, as explored by Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, through designating her body as the object itself in the work’s instructions. In doing so, Abramović adopted an extreme passivity as performer to force the boundaries of the social contract to be completely set, pushed, and restricted by the actions of the self-regulating audience. According to anecdotes of individuals present, the event ended once disagreements within the audience determined the threshold of the transaction to have been pushed to its absolute ethical limit. After hours of Abramović enduring razor cuts and sexual assault, the performance was declared over once the ‘outsiders’ pressed the loaded gun into Abramović’s hand and positioned her finger around the trigger, only for Abramović’s gallerist to wrench the gun away from her. In this way, the participation of the audience determines that the social contract between performer and audience stops just short of death. 

This conclusion aligns itself with similar practices by other masochistic performance artists of the 1970s. As described by Kathy O’Dell, artists like Abramović tested the limits of their own endurance to ‘dramatize the importance of a transaction that is often overlooked or taken for granted.’ What’s more, these artists positioned themselves in a representative art historical tradition by utilizing the body as a metaphor to speak more broadly through performance. The exploration of the contract present in Rhythm 0 holds much wider cultural significance. Beyond simply scrutinizing informal performative or interpersonal contracts held between individuals, Rhythm 0’s presentation in a gallery suggests a questioning of more literal art world contracts and how they treat the artist or the art work. In this way, Abramović aligns herself metaphorically with the art object on top of embodying its objectification.

In addition to this passivity speaking to an inversion of traditional audience/performer relations, Abramović identified herself as an object, extending agency over her body to encompass responsibility for all audience interactions, in the interest of removing all potential identification with the audience as a group. As opposed to being performed on a stage, Rhythm 0’s presentation in a gallery allowed Abramović to perform on the same level as her audience, creating a communal space of shared identification. However, by identifying herself as the object and ‘taking all responsibility’ for whatever might be done to her body, Abramović’s extension of bodily agency instills ownership of her body onto the audience, effectively removing herself from their social order. Abramović's positioning aligns closely with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, which describes a ‘sacred man’ who can be killed by anyone without it being designated as murder. Understood through this framework, Abramović’s only inclusion in the social order of the performance is through her exclusion or potential elimination from that order. Through this transference of bodily ownership, Abramović evacuates all notions of subjectivity or identity that might allow her to identify with the audience as a community. 

Within the context of Abramović’s self-removal, the increasing violence of the audience's interactions suggest truths about how community is constituted through the elimination of the other, whether that be through conformity or death. By situating herself as the other through objectification, Abramović placed her audience in a position of power by supplying them with group identification, designating them as a community in relation to her objecthood. What’s more, she further empowered them by supplying that community with agency over her body. This gesture recalls Jean-Luc Nancy’s construction of community as being revealed through the death of others, designating community as that which ‘takes place through others and for others.’ As follows, in Rhythm 0, the audience’s interactions can be read as increasingly motivated by attempts to make Abramović ‘break’, or end her performance. By making Abramovic ‘break’ through their participation, the audience would thus eliminate all the qualities of her performance that disqualified her from identification with them. As it happened, the placement of a gun in Abramović’s hand could have literally killed her as the other. However, it figuratively killed her as the other by ending the performance, forcing her to re-join the community by reclaiming her bodily agency. 

Even before the audience’s participation ultimately attempted to end the performance, the nature of the interactions themselves demonstrate how community constructs identity onto an identity-less other. According to archival images of the performance, the audience mainly consisted of men, pictured gazing giddily at the table of objects they could use on Abramović’s body. Through their interactions, the male audience constructed an identity onto Abramović’s objectified body, assigning her the roles of ‘madonna, mother, and whore.’ Despite this projection of identity constructed by the audience, Abramović’s performance of passivity ultimately renders her completely indifferent to these identifications. For example, one image shows Abramović holding a mirror with the words ‘I am Free’ inscribed. The obvious irony of this statement reveals how the ‘freedom’ is something only assigned to her, but ultimately sacrificed by her extension of bodily agency onto her audience. 

The true revelation of Rhythm 0 comes from what is created by the audience’s participation. In reaction to Abramović’s performance of extreme passivity, the audience’s participatory actions reveal the boundaries of the social contract of performance and the hierarchy that comes to be when this contract is inverted. When placed in a position of power by Abramović’s extension of agency, the participation of Rhythm 0’s audience enacts the dynamics of a self-regulating community when faced with the imposition of an identity-less other. Finally, this participation reveals how community constructs and imposes identity on this other, ultimately succeeding when the other’s difference is eliminated.

Works Cited

McEvilley, Thomas, ‘MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ/ULAY, ULAY/MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ’, ArtForum, 22.1 (September 1983)

O’Dell, Kathy, ‘He Got Shot’, in Contract with the skin: masochism, performance art and the 1970's, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 1-16

Richards, Mary, ‘Key Works’, in Marina Abramović, (London: Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2010), pp. 87-93

Ward, Frazer, ‘Abramović: “You can stop. You don’t have to do this.”’ in No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience, (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), pp. 109-130

Grab the Earth by Its Crust and Pull:

Los Angeles’ SPY Projects Reimagines Art Market Traditions for a World at the End of Art History.

Profile included in Roski Mag Issue 15 - Spring 2023

On August 11, 1956, Jackson Pollock died in a car crash. Clouded by the tragedy of his untimely death, like countless other ill-fated rock stars, actors, and artists that followed him, the most famous abstract expressionist’s work soon rose to an unforeseen, legendary importance, and his auction prices quickly followed suit. Reaching past the abstract expressionist movement into pop art and beyond, financial figures once inconceivable became commonplace as a cult of personality fueled by myths of fame-fueled self-destruction and genius artistic practice morphed into unignorable branding opportunities to beguile collectors and curators across the world. In the ensuing decades, the art market’s consideration of a piece’s worth was no longer necessarily determined by painterly labor or aesthetic value, but more so by the whims of cultural trends, investment portfolios, and unpredictable auction records. Money spoke louder than paint and canvas ever could. Thus, the history of art in the 20th century quickly became eclipsed by the history of commerce. 

Six decades later, after finishing their academic studies in art and faced with this culmination of aesthetic-driven art history, Pietro Alexander and Sasha Filiminov aspired to create a space to resurface questions of taste finally displaced from the art world’s market-driven answers. Their response inevitably manifested in the creation of their gallery: SPY Projects. Opening its doors in the Summer of 2020, the duo established SPY as a space to return art to the aesthetic-focused progressive trajectory in which it was once situated. Aiming to traverse the seemingly immovable barriers of art world tradition, SPY specializes in exhibitions that transform the typically callous expanse of the gallery space beyond recognition of gallery conventions. In doing so, instead of metabolizing work just as you would any piece of visual media experienced on a phone or a billboard, viewers can encounter it with fresh eyes. For instance, in SPY’s exhibition of Mia Scarpa’s work in Spring 2022, metallic wainscotting-covered walls reflect a distorted image of the viewer’s gaze back at them. Or, in their SPY’s Fall 2021 group exhibition, Disassembly Line, artists were tasked to create pieces from scraps of a car’s body placed in the center of the gallery like a carrion torn to its bare bones. By obliterating preconceptions of what a gallery space can or should be, SPY’s exhibitions attempt to pierce through the stupor of looking in a visually-saturated culture. In doing so, the work is once again elevated to a state where it can provide intellectual and even spiritual nourishment.

This ideological desire – to revitalize the identification of meaning within images in a time when they have nearly become a worthless currency—is clearly seen in SPY’s Spring 2023 presentation of Daniel Healey’s Action Transfer. Through his tape paintings and Letraset drawings, Healey composes an elegy to the death of print media. In the shadow of widespread digitization, Action Transfer honors print media for its capacity to record and proliferate images, thus making a large world feel more intimate in the process. In his paintings, Healey creates a camouflage-like deluge of images and textures reapplied to canvas with scotch tape straight from vintage made-to-order catalogs, selecting images such as light bulbs, tree-filled windows, and textile patterns. Due to the image’s application with tape, the final product has a glossy finish recalling panes of glass shattered and meticulously reconstructed into a discordant mosaic. Highly stylized images, once clearly defined in orderly shopping catalogs, lose their shape and appear unrecognizable when displaced from their original context. 

In a sense, these man-made image fragments are reduced to the primordial state of flux from whence they came when reconfigured into Healey’s collages of crystalline natural forms. In pieces such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for Cage, an assemblage of image fragments recalls the riotous horror vacui of Hieronymus Bosch, as clumps of images mutate and echo as they distort themselves into a cacophonous landscape of disparate textures. However, at quieter moments, such as Sky Collection for Goode, Healey’s fragments blur and soften one another as they accumulate layer by layer beneath a glossy veneer, echoing the abstracted solace of Joan Mitchell’s aquatic landscapes. 

In this way, this assemblage of image fragments take on new, postmodern meanings when literally lifted from their intended context as advertisements and appropriated within a contrasting high art context, questioning the originality of image-making in the echo chamber of a nostalgia-obsessed visual culture. On another level, due to the image fragments’ original status as advertisements, Healey presents a commentary on the art market’s regard of art purely as commodity, thus abandoning the valuation of work based primarily on its aesthetic merit. While these catalogs have been recently phased out in favor of a digitized shopping experience, their cheap, disposable status creates a sense of irony when considered on a large canvas within a gallery context: while print catalogs are widely discarded for their antiquated scarcity, the art market distinctly inflates the value of images because the objects themselves are rare (despite similarly sidelining consideration of their aesthetic value).

While Action Transfer presents just one artist’s interpretation of SPY’s founding ethos, Alexander and Filiminov are only just beginning their plans to use SPY as a space to respond and adapt to the world around it without conforming to art market mores solely out of obligation. In the future, Alexander hopes to use the resources accumulated by SPY to invest back into their artists’ work. As a result, the scale and outreach of SPY’s artists will be able to stand out among the ever-expanding, globalized nature of current and future cultural movements: “The idea is that, even with simple exhibitions, to increase scale: the size of the work, where it is, exhibitions that happen across borders, like international exchanges. It’s a globalized world, and to have an impact, you have to have a global presence. I don’t mean that so much in terms of business, it’s true in terms of business, but also in terms of art. You need to be able to rip the earth, grab the earth by its crust and pull.” In doing so, SPY Projects will assist in the production and promotion of art that can echo more resoundingly in its viewer’s mind than money ever can.

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Death to Immortality!:

Selin Aydin’s Images Find the Eternity within the Ephemeral

Profile included in Roski Mag Issue 14 - Fall 2022

When you take a picture, how much of that moment are you really taking with you? How much of it can you really keep? We’ve now found ourselves blinded by the ultra-saturation of images: spoiled with opportunities to take pictures, to stop time and stretch a single second for all that it’s worth. As our camera rolls accumulate to figures unimaginable a decade ago, so grows the semblance of security over the fleeting moment that photography offers us. We’ve inherited a belief that if you document every moment, it can live forever. Therefore, so can you.

The images of Selin Aydin subvert this arrogance. The multimedia artist and Las Vegas native depicts bodies embracing their ephemerality, using the very media that promise immortality to reject a solid and eternal form. Originally working in painting, Aydin’s forays into photography have allowed her to adorn both mediums with characteristics of the other, manipulating InkJet printer ink by hand or embellishing a canvas with painted light leaks. Aydin’s figures boil and melt into one another, represented in their truest, humblest forms: a recyclable abundance of chemicals and minerals, bodies made immortal through their disposability.

AF: Where does your process begin? Does it start with a technique or a specific object that you want to explore?

SA: Usually it starts with the source image. It's either a photo I take myself, or a photo I find that's royalty-free. Then I work on it digitally. It's in Photoshop, a process of layers and filters and effects and warping, [then] printing it out. Doing stuff to it, physically scanning it, putting it back into Photoshop. It's a digital way of painting. And from there, I'll decide where I want it to go. Whether I want it to become a painting, or exist digitally, whether I want it to be an Inkjet manipulation and have it printed on photo paper. If I want to make it into an encaustic piece [beeswax and damar resin], and then it'll develop from there.

AF: Do the different mediums exist in the same space in your brain? Or do they each make you work differently?

SA: They exist in the same space. It's the same process mirrored across different mediums, but it's the same process of working. It's just a different way to get to that goal.

AF: Do the different histories of each medium affect the way you approach them?

SA: My goal is to turn things on their head. When I'm doing photography, I'm trying to make them look like paintings. When I'm painting, I try to make them look like photographs. It's this way of negating the medium I'm working with.

AF: Your pieces deal with the human body. What attracts you to the body as a place for exploration and representation?

SA: A lot of my work right now deals with memento mori, which is Latin for “remember that you must die.” So, what I'm investigating right now is the temporality of the human body, existence, and the ephemeral nature of our time here. And, I guess, in a spiritual sense, what are we? What is a body? What is our perception of the world? 

What I like about the human body is that it's pure, it's free of any external influences. When it's nude, it's a representation of the human species and existence. And then when I put it through these manipulations, distorting it or decaying it or warping it, the point of it is to show how the same happens to our bodies. We are temporary, it's a more humbling way to see it. My goal is also to decenter anthropocentric beliefs that the West holds that humans are the highest form of life.

AF: I see that a lot in the inkjet manipulation. The forms refuse to hold shape when they drip. Do you approach bodies differently within different mediums? 

SA: Yeah, definitely. When it’s inkjet manipulation, it's gloomier. It's dealing with the fallibility of the human body. It's trippy. It's decay. Then when I'm working with photography, it's more so about the ephemeral fleetingness of the body. It's like using long shutter speeds. When I'm painting, I'm blurring downwards into this vertical haze. That's also this disintegration of the body.

AF: Is there any medium or process that you haven't approached yet that you're interested in exploring?

SA: Yes. I just went to Luminex this weekend, an event downtown where they projected 12 different artists' works on two buildings in LA. It's all projection mapping. That's something that I've always had an interest in. I'm trying to find ways to use light in my work—working on glass, keeping it near a window, seeing how the light can interact with it, or lighting up the backs of my paintings and having two layers or animating my paintings with a projection. There’s so much I want to try.

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Stumbling Towards Dystopia: 

Zoe Alameda Contrasts a Burning Present with a Shattered Future

Profile included in Roski Mag Issue 13 - Spring 2022

In her debut exhibition, rest my head on a pile of tacks, Zoe Alameda echoes the shouts of a generation slowly deafened by the reverberations of its own voice. This voice calls out “How lucky are we to be the only generation in history that gets to see what the end of the world looks like? How rare? How fucked?” A Junior at USC, Alameda adopts and instigates the current Gen Z moment through the medium in which it is mainly expressed: a nihilistic social media culture doomed to scroll aimlessly in an echo chamber of repetition that algorithmically never ends. Watching the world stumbling towards dystopia through this discursively auto-cannibalistic lens has bred the shared internet language employed in Alameda’s work, one spoken in memes underwritten with the frustration of being born at the mercy of someone else’s consequences.

Alameda adopts this Gen Z perspective by juxtaposing the competing vistas that contemporary life forces us to balance: that of a climate-change-swept, decaying physical world and of a separate digital landscape purporting itself to be the nature of the future. This juxtaposition appears in one painting through the surreal depiction of a conversation between two stylistically discordant figures: an animated Manga schoolgirl and a more naturalistic, cowboy-hat-wearing, gun-touting policeman. Much like our current reality, scraps of the two disparate worlds are in constant competition for the viewer’s attention. At her more abstracted, iPhone screenshots are superimposed over distorted images of the crumbling natural world, these two landscapes burn into one another like a Fox News logo bleached into a TV screen. 

Alameda approaches our culture’s love of social media without sanctimony, considering the gaps it has both bridged as well as disastrously widened. She says social media is “a double edged sword… While, in my work, I complain about it a lot, I also share this deep love for the internet.” Alameda credits the ubiquity of an iPhone at her side with allowing her to reliably record ideas as quickly as she has them, on top of acting as a resource for accessing inspiration from other artists, such as Andrew Hunczak and Ian Bruner. Hailing from Arcadia, California, Alameda’s interaction with these artists on Instagram, as well as with the SoCal DIY Community as a whole, allowed her to build confidence as she was starting out as an artist. Alameda recognizes how the internet played such a foundational role in her first artistic experimentation because of social media’s allowance for “a space that you can really just feel free and kind of anonymous.” In her sculpture, Alameda goes further to explore the root of this anonymity’s liberating effects, that being the internet’s unique detachment from the physical, “real” world. 

 While Alameda’s paintings contemplate the present realities of the natural world’s coexistence with the internet, her sculptures dive deeper into the possibility of a future exclusively online. Her sculpture situates the solidity of human debris that will be our ruins as a foil to the weightless ephemerality of the internet. An installation piece drapes a tapestry of tee shirts, gloves, plastic bags, and printed memes high from the ceiling, forcing the viewer to stand in its shadow, looking up at the towering trash threatening humanity’s demise. However, another piece cleverly utilizes concrete rubble to turn this idea on its head, questioning what it means to be “concrete” at all. Whereas tangible debris and the internet are at once depicted as diametrically opposed, Alameda’s overlaying of internet artifacts over cement can simultaneously be read as emphasizing how foundational social media has become to the new world being built online. 

This idea holds resonance beyond support of NFTs and the “metaverse” positing the blockchain to be an equitable safe haven for our digitized consciousnesses away from the climate apocalypse, a position that Alameda herself rejects. The bridges constructed by social media have provided a space for cultural evolution, not to mention an revolutionary foundation for countless social movements, some that could reverse the climate catastrophe to which the internet claims to be a panacea. While Alameda’s reflection of the world created by social media is at times seeped in cynicism, beneath every work is a faith that the technology that got us into this mess will be the very same tools to get us out of it.

Exciting Los Angeles gallery openings to visit this month 

Included in the April 12, 2022 edition of The Daily Trojan

Spring has sprung and so have a brand new crop of art openings throughout Los Angeles. From Midcity to the Arts District, these openings offer new works across all types of media, spanning painting to screen printing to stained glass sculpture.

A gallery can be a perfect excuse to get out or can even be a quick addition to spice up a date night. Here are some of the most exciting highlights from the L.A. art scene to see this April.

“Love You” – Cara Benedetto at Night Gallery (April 2 – May 7)

Anyone familiar with stan culture will recognize the terrors of internet virality explored in Cara Benedetto’s “Love You.” Social media fan culture stands at the forefront of the show, a series of mixed media works that satirize, honor and unpack the parasocial relationship between celebrities and their deadly droves of loving fans. Benedetto’s favorite celebrities, including Mariah Carey, Angelina Jolie and “Euphoria”’s Zendaya and Hunter Schafer, are featured as blurred, uncanny versions of themselves in her pieces. 

These distorted figures, created utilizing canvas prints copied several times over and outlined with oil paint, recall the impossibly faultless version of celebrities built up by their fans only to be expediently destroyed at the earliest sign of a human flaw. Combining image and text to evoke Instagram captions or advertising copy, Benedetto’s work plays like a horror comedy poking fun at the dystopian nature of the public’s relationship with our icons - a relationship poisoned by the toxic and deafening echo chamber of the internet.

“The Understudies” — Em Kettner at François Ghebaly (April 2 – May 7)

In her sophomore exhibition at François Ghebaly, Em Kettner finds inspiration in the most unlikely of subjects: snails. At first glance, the undeniable quirk of Kettner’s “The Understudies” may lead one to write the works off as trivial, or even worse, “cute.” However, beneath each piece’s quaint veneer lies an absurdist comedy pondering the violence of observation.

Kettner stages images featuring eager-eyed doctors subjecting snails to surgery before an audience of spectators on the surface of miniscule 2 by 2 inch ceramic tiles. As with most art, these works are best experienced in-person. Pictures hardly do the tiny sketches justice, as the miniscule size of each tile forces the viewer to lean in and create an intimacy with the vignettes they observe. 

Within each scene, the theatrical operations taking place beg the viewer to question the roles of performer and audience that society forces them to portray during everyday life. Especially in the context of the rotating facades of social media, everyone becomes the snail melting under scalding spotlights, the doctor subjecting it to such invasive attention or the audience simply sitting back and enjoying the struggle. 

“Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain” — Derek Fordjour at David Kordansky (March 26 – May 7)

To enter Derek Fordjour’s brilliant “Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain” is to come under the illusionary influence of a magic show. Magic informs Fourdjour’s work as a prism through which to look at Black diasporic relationships with the past. 

The routine of a magic trick echoes the repetition of Black cultural traditions throughout history, depicted in the installation and sculptural collage pieces through images of jazz performance, cotillions and Carnival parades. Newspaper appears as a motif in the show, both materially and as a metaphor for history itself: spliced, painted and reconfigured into the paintings’ figures, suggesting that identity is constructed from our ancestors and the cultural histories that precede us. 

Don’t forget to catch the live magic performance by Kenrick “ICE” McDonald repeating daily at 2 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays, in the gallery space until the culmination of the show on May 7th.

“Recent Sculpture” — Group Show at Matthew Brown Los Angeles (April 2 – May 7)

Matthew Brown LA’s “Recent Sculpture” presents 12 provocative works which represent exciting developments in the world of contemporary sculpture. Canadian artist Fin Simonetti contributes a highlight of the show through “Gusset 5,” a menacing yet delicate stained glass bear trap cast in baby blues and dark amber. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the show comes from its variety of material and expression. In stark contrast to the grim glitter of “Gusset 5” are Patricia Ayres’ sculptures, two towering columns of stained pantyhose, recalling disembodied sections of the human body bound by constricting straps of elastic. The works of “Recent Sculpture” span from humorous to haunting, all that must be seen to be truly understood.

“West Coast Paintings” — Melissa Brown at Anat Ebgi Gallery (April 2 – May 7)

In her first L.A. solo exhibition, Melissa Brown portrays the world’s current state as the bad acid trip that it's turned out to be. Wildfires, wind turbines and iPhones are painted in psychedelic gradients of millennial pink and acid green. Yet, beneath the surface of the works’ vibrant colors wails a pain seen only during the show’s more abstract moments. 

In “Huntington Portal,” an unique coral-like skeleton stands in a surreal, tiffany blue garden. However, upon closer inspection, a distraught, miserable face appears in this sculpture’s negative space, mouth agape almost in the midst of a scream. Brown combines screen printing, airbrush and oil paints to present this vision of the West Coast that, through its disturbed detachment from reality, hits a little too close to home. 

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Los Angeles gallery openings to catch this February 

Included in the February 23, 2022 edition of The Daily Trojan

Strolling through the countless art galleries of Los Angeles, it’s easy to be struck by stunning new perspectives of the world at large yet find yourself even more astonished by the unexplored layers of L.A. you never even knew you were missing. 

If you’re looking to experience the art of L.A. without paying museum admission prices, a day of gallery-hopping is a great excuse to bust out of the Fryft zone and waste a Saturday. With new shows by modern legends and rising stars from USC and across the nation, here are a few of the month’s most promising openings to catch before they’re gone.

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.: “There Was There” – Matthew Brown Los Angeles (Feb. 12 – Mar. 19)

In “There Was There’s” 30 odd pieces, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. visualizes the cultural exchange between residents of the South Central community and the physical environment in which they live and work. A native Angeleno, Gonzalez’s work fills Matthew Brown Los Angeles’s Mid-City location but appears recognizable to the area outside the gallery’s front doors. 

Multimedia pieces range from sculptures poking fun at coin-operated rides often found outside of a local grocery store to oversized paintings that become the walls of the gallery itself, fit with vibrant signage for beauty salons. In his satiric yet profound first solo show, Gonzalez comments on the nature of late-stage capitalism’s advertisement-congested world as it appears on the ground through the eyes of the people living within it.

Zoe Alameda: “rest my head on a pile of tacks” – Gayle and Ed Roski Gallery (Feb. 25 – Mar. 9)

In this debut solo exhibition at the Gayle and Ed Roski Gallery on USC’s campus, Zoe Alameda, a junior majoring in fine arts, contemplates the distorted perspective of a generational cohort growing up looking at the world for the very first time through the lens of an iPhone. Through paintings, installations and sculpture work, Alameda superimposes internet artifacts, such as anime characters and Instagram screenshots, over jagged landscapes of a world stumbling towards dystopia. As terrifying as it is awe-inspiring, “rest my head on a pile of tacks” juxtaposes the looming digital existence that threatens to swallow our species whole with the reality of the declining earth we are doomed to leave behind.

Dominique Fung: “Coastal Navigation” – Nicodim Gallery (Feb. 12 – Mar. 19)

Through 10 paintings, Dominique Fung’s “Coastal Navigation” at Nicodim Gallery forms a path from sea to land and back again. The Brooklyn-based painter casts objects, such as terracotta bulls and jade pagodas, underwater — out of space and time from their habitual environments on land. 

Just as rising waters from climate change are politically regarded as a work of fantasy, the seawater of Fung’s golden, celadon and lapis ocean floor reflects and rearranges these traces of man until they are personified to dream-like proportions. In “Traverse Through,” Gatsby-like eyes embellish a fringed lampshade come to life, casting an all-knowing light upon the shadowy ocean floor. Fung’s surreal “Coastal Navigation” presents a journey that is at once, both timeless and deathly immediate, magical and melancholic, and one not to be missed.

Arantza Peña Popo: “The World is Looking for You” – Junior High L.A. (Feb. 11- Mar. 6)

“The World is Looking for You” sees Arantza Peña Popo, a junior majoring in journalism, interweaving three disparate narratives threaded together by the joint exploration of what it is to exist within the dark of night. In adapting the “zine” style to a gallery exhibition, the viewer is brought in close to interact intimately with Peña Popo’s characters and their stories. While the works themselves are physically small, the narrative they express explodes far beyond their traditional rectangular confines, capturing the swells of emotion released by night’s blurring of the line between danger and security in dreamy peaches, pinks and magentas. 

Group Show: “Luncheon on the Grass” – Jeffrey Deitch (Feb. 19 – Apr. 23)

“Luncheon on the Grass” at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Mid-City enters a conversation started over 150 years ago by Édouard Manet’s iconoclast masterpiece “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” considered by many to be the first modernist painting. The show includes works from icons such as Diane Arbus, Jeff Koons and Kehinde Wiley, in addition to rising stars such as Ariana Papademetropoulos, Salman Toor and Dominique Fung. The multimedia exhibition interrogates Manet’s mysterious original depicting two men seated in conversation accompanied at a picnic by a nude woman who peers deeply over her shoulder into the unrelenting eyes of the ever-intrusive viewer. These contemporary works deconstruct the painting’s complex and controversial legacy and update the discourse  Manet started for the social media savvy, postmodern viewer of the present. 

A World Unbound: How Cory Feder Untangles Reality

Profile included in the Spring 2021 edition of USC Haute Magazine

Growing up, the irony of the phrase “life imitates art” lingered elusively over my head, floating outside my comprehension. Unbeknownst to me, the sentiment’s true meaning cast a cold shadow on my perspective, reducing the glimmer of every painting I saw and book I read to cynical globs of paint and meaningless words on a page. The idea that life could be, at times, so beautiful, so horrific, so enchanting as to be understood only through its own fantastical reflection was unimaginable to me, someone who had lived so little life themself. As years, art, and experiences passed before my eyes, the intended irony of the phrase revealed itself to me in the distance between art and life itself — the proximity between a subject and its mirrored image sometimes continents apart, sometimes as close together as the width of the surface of a canvas. Unlike myself, Cory Feder has understood this distance since childhood.

Growing up in Denver, Colorado, Feder has been using art to comprehend the world around her since before she can remember: “Drawing is something that predates most of my other memories so I think it is hard to say how and when that transformed from ‘drawing’ to ‘making art.’” While talking with It’s Nice That, the Santa Fe-based artist credits drawing with having “carved the first doorway to acknowledging otherness beyond what I could see with my eyes.” Feder’s illustrations cope with the relationship between one’s inner dreams and their external reality by identifying manifestations of that internal fantasy within the outside world. One illustration depicts this relationship by showing a woman’s tears dried by cheery butterflies with watchful, guiding eyes inscribed upon their wings. In a way, these figures depict fantasy healing the wounds of reality. Another drawing shows a woman in an Edenic paradise balancing a tower of watermelon slices as she grins eye to eye with an impish-faced daddy long legs spider. From an upper register, Gatsby-like, all-knowing eyes overlook the garden, crying poppy petal tears that transform into a field of flowers as they fall to the woman’s feet. Feder’s drawings depict a pastoral reality where nature is playfully personified — an ally with humanity in the frivolous game of everyday survival. Rather than escaping from the everyday through fantasy, Feder’s illustrations capture their viewers’ imagination by laying bare the fantastic within the ordinary. 

On top of weekend art classes and attending an arts magnet school, Feder’s love of art, illustration, and animation found its origin in newspaper comics such as “Archie” and “Calvin & Hobbes,” as well as the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” While these cartoons instilled a love for the forms that she still expresses herself within today, a majority of the childhood creativity seen in her current art first grew in her own backyard. She credits her time playing in the outdoors as a child with establishing “a deep comfort and ritual of playing out my imagination however it needed to be played out. Playing for hours with dirt and talking to plants as a kid was most definitely the most important foundation for my creativity today.” While her work today is imbued with the whimsy of this youthful creativity, Feder additionally employs the mythology of her Korean heritage to create the dreamscapes seen in her art.

Feder was brought up on the Korean-Presbyterian traditions of her mother and the Orthodox Jewish traditions of her father. Beyond the occasional experimental Korean-Jewish fusion dish, Feder credits this juxtaposition of cultures with providing her with a “sense of the tension and the play around cultural boundaries.” In regard to her art, she cites her cultural upbringing with teaching her that “creative spaces are the best place to not only mediate the contrasting aspects of different cultures and traditions but find intersections within them as well.” Feder implements these contrastive elements of Korean and American culture by constructing a vision of the modern world in coexistence with magical figures from Korean folklore stories.

Feder focuses primarily on one of these figures, the legendary goblins of the dokkaebi, as the subject of her comic “I Am Famous On CCTV.”  The comic explores the manner in which these ancient mythological goblins coexist anachronistically in modern-day Seoul. Described by Feder as “protectors, they are, up to no good,” even when not the subject of her comics, Feder occasionally doodles them into the margins of her illustrations. Whether or not intentional, Feder’s metatextuality reveals how her reality is always infused with their mischievous magic. Feder charts her first image of Korean folklore back to the facades of traditional Korean tal (masks) hung on her dining room wall: “these very sacred figures embedded themselves into my memory before I was able to understand the nuances of my identity and how I would express that through my artwork.” While these cultural figures have been in Feder’s life since childhood, it was not until she began to visit Korea after high school that her curiosity about her heritage began to appear in her work.

Just as the faces of these figures themselves have appeared in Feder’s imagination since her youth, she charts the artistic contemplation of culture and reality in her work back to a childhood relationship with these mythological entities. Feder says “as a kid, I was far from comfortable in my body, growing up with very few people who looked like me. I think what began as an escape from reality led more to this acknowledgment that the events taking place in my waking life were just as layered and multifaceted as my dream world.” This idea appears in Feder’s work through her creation of a world that not only blurs the demarcation of cultural boundaries but more profoundly constructs a liminal space that balances the real with the mythological. In speaking with Uniqueboard, Feder describes how she perceives the relationship between myth and reality: “I've always believed that myth provides ethos for the world at large and in the same sense, I believe that paying attention to what we see in our minds whether it's through dreams or fantasy is equally valuable. Reality is not just what is there when I open my eyes, it is layered, tangled and sometimes invisible, and life exists on every plane of it.” By locating the seemingly unreal in a world that’s all too real, Feder’s art demonstrates the power in rewriting the story of one’s life, reclaiming the words nonconsensually inscribed by the hand of another. Thus, agency is found in self-redefinition or even the rejection of a definition whatsoever.

This idea imbues Feder’s work with a sense of visual irony: seemingly imaginary, mythological figures assist in the search for the truest reality. Feder says “When I was younger, everything felt absolute and uncompromised. Now, of course, reality is anything but absolute and it has become vital to unpack the myth of what we learned as children to allow for a new reality to unfold. I think the allowance to have these stories unfurl without judgment is what creates balance.” Feder’s work luxuriates in the comfort of nostalgia, however not without taking that nostalgia to task. Indulgence in the past thus cannot exist without assuming responsibility for the ignorance that might unknowingly reside within memory. Feder actively rewrites revisionist history, pondering one’s relationship with their childhood flaws and all. She works to untangle the knots of retrospect that time hasn’t had the agency to untie on its own. Feder’s relationship with her memory of her childhood speaks to a broader inspection of the purpose of one’s personal narrative within art.

Feder’s work explores how art can work to edify our own personal narrative, finding comfort in the uncertainty of the future by shining a light onto the obscurity of the past. Feder says that examining her own personal narrative through art has allowed her to put her own narrative in “simple terms.” Further, she believes that “having a space to see your own narrative sit externally from yourself is incredibly valuable because it allows for the narrative to have its own form and its own past.” As one is the sum of their experiences, unpacking personal narrative is another way to unpack one’s own reflection. In its imitation of life, Feder’s work demonstrates how art can guide introspection. Furthermore, Feder spoke to Uniqueboard about how utilizing art to shine an objective light onto one’s personal narrative is not only a personal duty but a shared, cultural obligation: “Through a cultural lens, I feel that people bringing the subconscious parts of themselves into tangibility is a beautiful way to transcend societal expectations and it could inspire many others to do the same.” 

Feder’s analysis of personal narrative carries an entirely new weight in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: transforming from an individual phenomenon to communal responsibility. In a time when quarantine has reduced the multiple perspectives with which we perceive the world to faces, voices, and words on a screen, our subjective points of view are increasingly vulnerable to manipulation. Each of our personal realities is suddenly malleable, primed by loneliness for distortion. Thus, the tampering effects of pandemic isolation have deemed community all the more imperative. Feder believes that the pandemic changed the way she views her own personal narrative in that “Before the pandemic, I was most definitely in a more individualistic mindset that now feels so frivolous. Knowing that my work is the channel of how I connect with others, it is most definitely transforming as I learn more about community-based thinking.” On top of affecting the perspective through which she sees the world as a human, this shift towards communal virtue appears prevalently in her point of view as an artist. 

One illustration, in particular, depicts Feder’s valuing of this communal spirit. Posted to her Instagram in March 2020 with the caption “All traveling together to our unknown destination,” the drawing shows a rare image of human faith in nature and in one another. A field of yellow and orange wildflowers is cleft in two by a path of people following a prophetic guiding star. Surrounding this small community, fantastical creatures with sharp teeth and forked tongues lurk in the tall grass, but a face in the crowd smiles back to the viewer unafraid. The star is unknown, wavering, but warm. The community finds its strength in numbers, in its shared faith. Just as the pandemic deems nature an enemy in its pathogens and an ally in its remedies, nature provides the security of a steadfast star in exchange for the danger of its earthen predators. Exemplified by the star itself, Feder reveals how time is nature’s perseverant gift to humanity during periods of trauma. The star demonstrates that the future may be uncertain, but it is, nevertheless, inevitable — and community is instrumental in the waiting. 

When not drawing or illustrating comics, Feder also explores her creative identity through animation, music, and sculpture. Feder says that each of these mediums expresses “different facets of one creative identity. They not only inform each other but allow for rhythm and space to occur in my thinking and research.” As a musician under her Korean name Yesol, Feder released a 6-track EP “Telluric” in 2017. Before the end of 2021, Feder plans to release new music as well as the project’s accompanying visuals. Additionally in the coming year, in collaboration with her friend Annaliza De Leon Evangelista, Feder and Evangelista’s collective Unidentified Butterflies plans to host a remote kite festival. Feder hopes the festival will “start dialogue within the Asian diaspora of decolonizing Asian identity and uplifting indigenous voices around the world.”

Especially during the numb, disorienting days of these pandemic years, humanity needs a vision of itself as seen through Feder’s eyes. The world as Feder illustrates it is both dull and kaleidoscopic, both euphoric and excruciating. Not one despite the other, but distinctly because of their coexistence within a single space. In blurring lines between cultures, realities, and eras, Feder constructs an image of our world that is boundless and infinite. Everything is possible because definitions are eviscerated, lines are erased. Subjectivity is truth. Myth is reality. In empowering the personal narrative as Feder does, life becomes art in all of its grandeur, mythology, and mundanity. Feder reduces the distance between life and art not by elevating the everyday to the point of distortion, but rather by shining a light on the unseen enchantment, reverie, and art within her viewer’s everyday life.