A VITAL LINK

in collaboration with

presented to you by

five collective

FIVE COLLECTIVE

Time, experimentation, and room for failure all pertain to the development of one’s artistic practice. Yet how specialized—or uniform—is the creative process?

How do the crucial steps needed to create a work of art inform the final results, and what insights do they provide? Can they be elevated to the realm of art, or do they already occupy a unique artistic niche?

We sought to answer these questions through academic research and the process of curation. Our findings are presented on December 13, 2014 in the exhibit “A Vi-tal Link,” showcasing finished works along with drafts, notes, and objects of experimentation. This exploration continues through this very zine of artist statements and interviews, as well as a mixtape of demos and prelimi-nary recordings available online.

curatorial statement

by Marielle Arcabascio, Vanessa Castro, Stephanie Eckardt, Mary Hornak, and Brooke Marine

thecreativecycle.org

Arts education is horribly underfunded in New York City public schools, with the Department of Education budgeting just $2 on art supplies and equipment per student each year. This hits high-pov-erty schools especially hard, as PTAs cannot make up the differ-ence and classrooms are left without even the most basic supplies, such as construction paper, markers, and paints. Students bene-fit greatly from engagement with the arts, as art allows students from different backgrounds—especially those who are isolated by language barriers—to express themselves freely, build confi-dence, and develop critical thinking, innovation, and communica-tion skills. Unfortunately, if public school teachers wish to provide their students with a quality arts education, they have to buy sup-plies themselves.

The Creative Cycle seeks to bridge the funding gap in New York City arts education by supplementing insufficient budgets in in-dividual classrooms. As part of the creative process, active art-ists tend to accumulate sketches that aren’t included in portfolios or sold, and sit in drawers unused and unseen. We collect these “process sketches” as donations from New York area artists, and sell the sketches on our website, www.thecreativecycle.org, and from vending stands in busy areas of the city. Artists are given the opportunity to include contact or portfolio information with each sketch, and the proceeds are used to purchase art supplies for NYC public schools.

THE CREATIVE CYCLE

Michael Adno

Colvin Brothers

Judy Cuker

Felicia Douglass

Ana Karimi

Rob Kulisek

Raveena

Chrissy Reilly

Summer Underground

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FEATURED ARTISTS

MARIELLE ARCABASCIO: When did you first realize you wanted to make art?

JUDY CUKER: I realized I want-ed to make art in first grade, during my first visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When I saw paint-ings by Monet and other Impres-sionist artists, I was truly inspired. I found that painting was the per-fect creative outlet for me.

MA: How do you go about cre-ating your work? Does it change piece to piece?

JC: When I make paintings or oth-er artworks, I first think about an idea or emotion I want to convey,

and those definitely change with each piece. Sometimes I simply stretch a blank canvas and then immediately start painting. I enjoy the freedom which allows me to simply paint whatever feels right in the moment, without too much advanced planning. Because I mostly make abstract paint-ings, the outcome of the paint-ings depend more on my phys-ical and gestural mark-making than any planning I do in ad-vance.

MA: What were the steps in-volved in making the prints featured in the show?

JUDY CUKER

JC: It was a tedious process be-cause it was one of my first times experimenting with silk-screen printmaking as a medium. I usu-ally use acrylic or oil painting in my artwork, and silk-screen printing involves a more complex process. This includes coating the screen with photo emulsion, ex-posing the screen to the picture I chose (my photograph of Flor-ence), washing out the screen, and finally coating the screen with ink and using it to make prints. For this book, I printed the picture in many different colored inks and on different colored paper. I cut up some of the prints and format-ted them into a book.

MA: How do you determine when you’ve completed a work?

JC: I don’t think an artwork is ever truly finished. Sometimes I revise paintings or other artworks I make four or five years after I initially say they are ‘finished.’ Making art is a never ending pro-cess...

MA: Do you think that your cre-ative process is unique to you and is it vital to understand and appre-ciate the finished product?

JC: I think that every artist has a creative process that is unique to them, and these processes are vi-tal to what makes each artist dif-ferent. I prepare to make artworks by visiting many museums and gallery exhibitions, where I gather ideas from other artists. I also love doing research on the Google Art Project, Artsy, and other online sources where high-def images of artworks are available. Looking at famous or important works of art gives me the best ideas about how I can improve my own artwork. •

In “Cracker Politics, The Limits of Colonial Knowledge,” I am mining the site of Florida, my own site of development, as a complex narrative formed by the Indian, Spanish, Brit-ish, French, Confederate, and colo-nial American past. Moreover, how our understanding of these histories and their legibility serve as deeds to our past and ultimately our future.

I hope to question the privileging of specific histories of Florida by its local communities, academic institu-tions, and the state itself, with larger implications of the National Register of Historic Places. These implications serve as the means to interrogate how Florida was settled and became a US territory.

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Establishing an iconographic as-sessment or visual vocabulary, the installation alludes to its increas-ingly high level of specificity and contingency. With this strategy, I try to map the inextricable ties between the colonial period of Florida and the post-colonial pres-ent. Those bonds lie in the hyper coded colonial knowledge that has fashioned the archive, history, and our idiosyncratic understanding of them.

These documents and monu-ments—embedded with traces of our past—are positioned as a way to ask questions rather than provide facts. The fundamental friction im-bued in these sites is the space be-tween identity and identification, the distance measured by memory.

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KPulled from a 1967 scientific journal on vision and memory, the image and text here reveals a testing process employed by practitioners and researchers looking to identify photo-graphic memory in children. Eidetic (photographic) mem-ory relates to mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible.

It occurs in a small number of children and generally is not found in adults. The raw and undeveloped darkroom paper that these have been printed onto can be understood as a reference to the imperma-nence of the photographic print, one that fades gradually over time.

MICHAEL ADNO + ROB KULISEK

VANESSA CASTRO: Tell us about the projects that you’re contributing to this show. ROB KULISEK: This past year has been a big transition from film to digital for me. Within photography, I’ve been figur-ing out what the specifics of the medium mean to me. I just started experimenting, using two different printing methods, one with an apparatus. I’ve been using a raw, traditional photo paper to be used as a surface for an inkjet print, and just seeing what happens. At first, it was just very ab-stract imagery, then I started to use these old images and text that spoke to the idea of memory and retaining an image. That’s the short version. VC: Michael, yours has been more of a long history, right? MICHAEL ADNO: I’m not working on anything else. This is the only thing I’m working on. It’s a longer project that I started about a year ago, with Rob. I’ve collaborated with a ton of people on it, and worked really closely with researchers, ar-chivists, curators, and other artists or peo-ple who aren’t even artists. Initially, it was a project that set out to chart the shifts of history through Flor-ida. The history is pre-historic in a way, because Indian history is not something

that is historicized and it’s been misrep-resented. It kind of starts there, and then leads into the colonial era. This is because unlike the rest of the United States, Flori-da has a really tumultuous colonial histo-ry with the Spanish, British, French, and later the Confederacy and the Republic of Florida, along with a lot of other American offshoots. All of those things leading up to the state becoming part of U.S. territory. That’s where the project began, but then from there transitioned to more generally a project about how people understand their position and relationship to a more dominant history and how that relates to the kind of regional narrative. There are a lot of implications of belonging. The different ways that I do it is looking at very specific histories, families and lin-eages in Florida that were maybe there before Florida was a state, or families that have traces to an Indian heritage, and so on and so forth, as well as architecture and what’s been deemed a “National Historic Site.” There’s kind of all these different tiers of the project that operate on differ-ent levels, but the core of it is looking at the more historical and epistemological elements that are social and political shifts in history, and how all of the things that happened in the pre-colonial period and colonial period have led up to how peo-ple understand Florida as a state, and how

in conversation

Floridians understand themselves. Furthermore, I think the bigger implica-tion is that it’s a method for how people think about Americanness, whiteness, oth-erness. While it is really specific, I like to think that it speaks to a more global con-text because I do think of it as a post-co-lonial place, so my proposition is, how do you integrate that into the more global framework? That’s what’s most important to me. It’s really complicated and academ-ic, but it is my position as a first-gener-ation American with family from South Africa and Austria, and always having one foot in one or the other, and always being insider/outsider. For me, it’s about belonging and history, and understanding that relationship. VC: When you’re looking for these imag-es, what are you keeping in mind? Are you just looking at images and saying, “this picture clearly shows racism” or “this pic-ture says a lot”? BROOKE MARINE: How do you figure out which images work? VC: Is it more instinctual? MA: That’s a really good question be-cause I feel like when I talk about the framework of the project it’s so general and that makes it less accessible. That’s a big concern of mine, how to make it more accessible. I’m not willing to compromise that to inject some kind of popular cul-ture or contemporary aspect that makes it consumable. I think that in that, it isn’t spontaneous. There are definitely strong reactions to things, but I have a very strong reaction to racist images, and that’s not something I’m looking for. I’m never looking for a racist image, I’m looking for things that make clear what parts of our history, and specifically parts of Floridian

history and that territory, have been mis-represented and what parts of that history have not been represented. The images I try to look at make what’s illegible legible or make this proposition that in reading this image, object or place, or thinking about that, there is so much of it that’s illegible and your projection falls flat immediately. As soon as you project onto it, as soon as you say, “This image is racist,” it kind of turns that back onto the viewer and makes them think about how they read an image, and spectatorship in general. VC: Rob, you talked about how the im-ages you chose to toy around with have to deal with memory. Is that why you chose them? Were you thinking that if you were experimenting with photography, you were looking for something that plays into time and memory? RK: It came out of Xeroxes to begin with because that was my goal, to have the raw photo paper printed on a Xerox machine, but I couldn’t find any to hold the paper because it ruined the machine. It was too thick and the glossiness wouldn’t take the ink. I still ended up using an inkjet print-er, which still got messed up. I had that imagery in mind because I was taking an old book and Xeroxing it at face value. Also, the dated image is important to try and pull up that halftone print. Even with-in the image that was in the magazine, it was double halftone because it had been reproduced multiple times. This idea of the multiple, and trying to trace that. MA: When you can split hairs and actual-ly read an image like that— RK: Yeah, I was looking for really graph-ic imagery. Because the photo paper starts out as this bright blue and over time

gradually shifts to grey. They say that be-tween eight and 10 years, it goes black. I was looking for whatever images printed on there to reveal a contrast gradually. I’ve been trying to get ahold of this place called the Wilhelm Color Research In-stitute. They created these machines that replicate UV decay over time, so they can put a print in and have this enhanced light hit it for a year or something, but it mimics about eight years worth of light. Ideally I’d want them to take some of these and put them through their system. VC: I like how both of your explanations are so different. Rob’s is so technical and very much about the material and Mike’s is very much about the context and mental search. Did you encounter any obstacles during the process? MA: The obstacles are the distance, living in New York while the project is based in Florida, being able to spend time there, all the boring stuff like the financial aspects, material, hiring researchers, curators. Over the summer, I was lucky enough to get a fellowship that funded it, so without that the project would’ve happened in a much more lo-fi way. Luckily, that fel-lowship sustained me through three and a half months of working on it. I think the biggest obstacle is gaining trust in a local community and being able to engage the community in a dialogue, as well as the academic tiers. I like to think that I work on a personal, state, national and eventu-ally global level, but working with peo-ple at the Library of Congress, I have to put on a fancy shirt and some nice shoes, and name drop NYU. At the state level it’s similar, but it’s just not as hoity-toity, working with researchers and curators and different archives. At the personal level it’s the most difficult because how do you gain trust as an outsider? Do you perform

and put on a show or do you really try to gain somebody’s trust? Learning how to do that has been really difficult. Rob and I had an encounter with this guy while we were working in Florida, in the middle of nowhere, miles away from any-thing. He was just riding his bike down the road and we were able to talk to him. That’s just an example of, how do you gain somebody’s trust so that they open up and tell you things about what they know about their town, Florida, their own history. I think that’s probably one of the biggest challenges.

Depending on what car you’re driving and what clothes you’re wearing, you bring out a massive camera and a bunch of equipment and it’s terrifying. It’s re-ally intimidating. It’s always negotiating that line, for me. How do I engage these people and make them feel comfortable? Oftentimes, the best way to do that is to just talk to people and take notes. No re-cording, nothing like that. It isn’t the most efficient. I guess my biggest challenges are method and financial things. BM: You were talking about engaging with people on different levels. Do you find it limiting to think about your projects academically? MA: Just because of who my mentor was and who I worked with, I was trained in a certain way and I have a certain method of approaching something. His example was always him against Sol LeWitt, and the difference between their methods and rec-ognizing something. I realize that I have a really specific method of how I want to do something, and it has a scholarly side. At the same time, I heard Eileen Myl-es, the really amazing poet, say that she writes poetry so that her mom can read

it. I don’t want to talk about audience be-cause I think that’s messy and loose, but it is limiting. What I mean is that I can talk about the politics of spectatorship, representation and post-colonial ideals in a way that could be really academic for a seminar or a panel, but at the same time I want to be able to tell the dude who—not because he has a lack of education, but because he’s never been engaged by any kind of academia—I want to be able to have the same conversation with him, but the vernacular is different. I can switch it on, it’s a Southern vernacular. Being able to talk to people in that way is re-ally important to me. It’s the same thing as if you’re working with a curator at the Florida State Archives, to a curator at the Library of Congress, that etiquette and the politics of how you talk to them or carry yourself are totally different. I think that’s what I like about it, that engagement. That dialogue. I think of the whole thing as a more—I hate the word—but a dialogic model. It really is a conversation, and there must be multiple parts. It’s not just the autonomous artist in a space, making things out of nothing. I never privilege my position in a lot of dif-ferent ways. I try not to. VC: Rob, how do you see yourself or your artistic practice in regards to academia or fine arts discourse? RK: I think this work that you’re taking is a sliver of where my mind is. My practice starts with photography and branches out from there. VC: You studied photography in school? RK: No, I didn’t finish school. I was in school for pre-med, and then started work-ing for an artist to do research. Then I real-ized that’s what I wanted to do.

VC: When we talk about all of the flow-ery, academic language, how does that tie in with your work? MA: Rob can hang with that. You don’t need to be in four to six years of seminar. Rob is more brilliant than anybody I’ve ever met. RK: I think for me, I’m always thinking about these things and always reading, but my dialogue within that isn’t always as clear when it comes to thinking about it. VC: When Five Collective has been talking about this, we talk about the pro-cess and of course we talk about school, and it’s, like, do you really need to go to school in order to develop the practice? It really could just be that you read some books, or go out and experiment and then you develop something. BM: I think it’s more about that engage-ment that Michael was talking about. MA: That’s a big part of it. When I was in school, Rob came to class sometimes. He came to a lot of classes. I was really privileged to be in an institution and to be able to study with people. I didn’t start out that way, I worked my way up to an academic institution. I don’t think you need it, but I think it helps. If you have the privilege to be in an institution like that, you really have to try to ignore that kind of engagement. It varies in different places—between Wesleyan or RISD, the engagement and people’s investments are so different. Not to say that you need to be at some high tier school, but a community college versus a liberal arts college will have a different conversation. I mean, in general. Some people are more concerned about what burrito they’re gonna get for dinner rather than how they’re gonna pay for rent next week.

I don’t think you need that, I just think it’s more like your relationship to it. When I was in school, my relationship to it was really antagonistic and competitive. It was like, ‘Fuck all you assholes from Con-necticut who are daughters and sons of doctorates who teach at Ivy League Insti-tutions. I’m from Florida, from the coun-try, and my parents are anti-intellectual.’ I’m more excited about having conver-sations with people who aren’t in that because I think in certain institutions, especially in ones based in the northeast, there’s a really boring conversation that gets reiterated and the students are condi-tioned to sputter it out. The international art speak that comes from that is a really easy thing to hide behind. And I hide be-hind it all the time. If somebody I don’t want to talk to asks me about my work, it’s really easy to actually disengage them with a hyper-intellectual two sentences. VC: Rob, do you do the same? RK: It depends. Always depends. [laughs] MA: I think it depends on your invest-ment in that kind of community. I really privileged it. I was, like, there’s 20 bodies in a room and we’ve been given two hours with a really brilliant person to discuss a topic, and that’s a huge privilege. Keep in mind, people are paying varying sums of money to be in that room, and 18 out of the 20 people didn’t give a shit, but two peo-ple out of 20 that want to have a conver-sation with whomever is leading it, that’s a huge privilege. When people recognize it as such, they really take advantage of it. RK: That’s something I’ve always yearned for in a way. But there’s also something really nice to building one’s own community outside of that, or having to work extra hard to get fed in that way.

VC: It sounds like this person you started working with was a mentor to you? RK: Taryn Simon, do you know her? It was her first international project that she was working on, and I was just doing re-search. She actually wanted me to work in the studio because she was looking for people outside of the art world. She didn’t want anyone to know what was going on. I started assisting her on some shoots and commissions she was doing. She did this one project where she stayed in JFK for an entire week and photo-graphed their contraband. In that experi-ence I learned all of the technical things that one needs to know to shoot a still life. It was really a mentorship on a technical level, but she was teaching at Yale that year and she basically said there is noth-ing good happening in school right now. [laughs] That resonated with me and I was, like, ‘Fine, I don’t need school.’ Still, I’m going to this program in L.A. I’m moving tomorrow, actually. That’ll be interesting, but it’s not an institutionalized program. MA: That’s an interesting thing, too. That’s an engagement with a communi-ty. That’s what seminar represents, in a way. There’s a whole program based on it. Also, what you were saying earlier about Taryn Simon not wanting anyone who wasn’t a part of the art world or had any of the baggage that comes with being an art student or artist, the worst thing right now is that the engagement is with a low-lying interdisciplinary work. People think that being interdisciplinary is just quoting phi-losophy or a text from anthropology and just making art. It’s really discouraging because there really are people who priv-ilege an interdisciplinary, discursive kind of work, and they’re actually doing it. VC: It’s still a scary word for some.

MA: It’s a buzzword. It’s a shiny color, it’s attractive. If you pepper that into the conversation, it’s just attractive. But, Rob, who’s technical and is a photographer, he’s an interdisciplinary artist. I think that’s something to privilege in the same way that Taryn could be considered a pho-tographer but the work goes way beyond that. It’s almost like maybe those things are departure points. That’s one thing I see, especially in fine arts. I went to com-munity college, then state school, spent a semester at a private arts school, then went to a big name private institution and was in a program where you could take classes in any school. So I saw all these complete-ly different facets of academia, as well as doing residencies at a different university.

Rob and I did everything from going to some party to going to some fancy, Princeton symposium. The engagement that you have outside of academia, in my mind, is always, I would say, more sat-isfying. I don’t want to say better, but it benefits the person who’s engaging with that more. And there are things you can’t get outside of academia. You can’t spend three hours talking about one sentence in a text. I mean, you can, but it’s very rare. I would say, most of my education came from way outside the walls of some ho-ity-toity institution, but if it weren’t for that institution I wouldn’t be able to talk about this because I wouldn’t have found art if it wasn’t through community col-lege, and I wouldn’t have studied any of the stuff I studied otherwise. School gave me a very topical thing, then it was on me. VC: How much does planning or sponta-neity play a role in your practice? RK: For me, at least, there is always a set of variables and you try to tackle each one. Within that there’s, ‘Oh, I can’t use this kind of paper so I have to use this, and that

means I have to use this printer.’

VC: I feel like a lot of it’s just trouble-shooting. RK: It’s trial and error. That’s what a stu-dio practice becomes. MA: I feel like I try to avoid spontaneity in a lot of ways because of my method and how I think about things. It’s inevitable that you come across it, and you have to really think about that idea and a response to something, and think about intuition. I think people who like to claim that their work is totally thought out and autono-mous or clear, that’s really boring. Be-cause, like Rob is saying, you just respond to things as you go, and if you don’t have access to something or that encounter that you’d like, or you’re not able to make that photograph or painting, whatever it is that you’re responding to, it can still be auton-omous in a way, but it’s still very call and response. Sometimes it’s between an artist and a sur-face. Sometimes it’s between a writer, a pen and their thoughts. Sometimes it’s be-tween a community and some kind of cul-tural producer engaging them. All of those things are tough. It’s always a response. I just have a problem with a free, willy-nil-ly response and a lack of addressing why you have that response. For me, that’s the thing that cannot be named. Why did you have that response, why were you offend-ed, why is that attractive? That’s where I find the kernel of a lot of things, that weird in-between space—which is another buzz-word. •

The work “Flesh Fetish“ was intended to critically examine the human relationship with animals and our meat-eating culture. The title of the work deliberately calls at-tention to our use of the word ‘meat’ as a euphemism for flesh. The original inten-tions of the work were to combine gro-tesque images of food with uncomfortable imagery of the male and female body. The relationships between these two subjects were aimed to evoke questions about the fetishes society has with flesh as both sources of food and personal pleasure. This project utilizes mono-screen printing techniques.

Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, Colvin Brothers currently lives and works in Montreal Canada. He is an artist who works primarily with print media. His work can be seen as a critical critique of western values towards animals. He strives to create art that uncovers the truths of globalization as it relates to the exploita-tion of animals and our dependence upon meat. It is heavily influenced by veganism, the logic of the capitalist market system, and global culture from the latter half the twentieth century to the present. Brothers’ artwork seeks to expose the realities of animal oppression and questions how we might reconsider the actions of mankind as it coexists with all sentient beings.

COLVIN BROTHERS

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VANESSA CASTRO: What drives you to make a song, and what is the process like?

BABEO BAGGINS: I wouldn’t say there’s a certain process. Making music is fluid and a song can come at any moment. A certain word can inspire a whole album. There isn’t one way to make a song.

VC: What comes first, the lyrics, or the beat?

BB: Normally we write the lyrics first and then find a beat to match. I’ve found when I try to write to the beat first, the song turns out sounding more forced and less honest.

VC: How did you learn to make music?

BB: I taught myself. I’ve always been sur-rounded by music, but I took it upon my-self to start creating it.

of the all-female rap group, Barf Troop

VC: What mediums do you work with?

BB: I play four instruments and I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember. Also, I’m big on cooking if you count food as art, which I do. [laughs]

VC: What spaces do you feel most com-fortable creating and/or sharing your work in?

BB: I feel most comfortable creating at home, and I can say it’s the same for every-one else in Barf Troop. It’s good to create within a space that you feel you’re not be-ing judged. I also love writing late at night on the train home. I like sharing my work in an open setting—concerts to be exact. I like being able to see the connection I have with my fans in a more physical sense. I like feeling like we’re one in that moment. I really treasure that.

COLVIN BROTHERS

Often when I improvise and choreograph, I don’t record my process. Yet I realize there is value in attempting to record and capture something, even if it is an attempt to capture the ineffable. The process can be as valuable as the outcome, as the choreography and materials I use evolve constantly as my projects develop. This is demonstrated in the exhibited video of my improvised dancing, filmed by Alexis Lim.

In an attempt to mesh film with dance, I explored the relationship between my moving body and the tulle, as well as the lighting and studio space. Alexis and I share a fascina-tion with improvisation and natural movement. We have previously worked together on photo and film sessions that explore and manipulate bodily perception. At the beginning of this project, we experimented with covering my entire body in pantyhose. Creating bodily distortion was intriguing, but the material proved too physically constricting. So we found a new medium in a discarded roll of tulle found on the street. My cats began unraveling it, and I became fascinated by the animation of the delicate material. I real-ized that I could use it in the same manner, manipulating it physically but also allowing it to flow independently. I initiated the movement, but the separation between my body and the tulle gave the material its own shape, filling the dimly lit space in a luminous, free-flowing manner.

Ultimately, I sought to use improvisation as an attempt to investigate the body, tulle, and darkness as mutually interacting landscapes. The darkened studio space, lit with a single bulb, allowed the tulle and my body to interact with yet another variable, light, adding a final layer to the visual experience. Inspired by both this project’s process and result, I look forward to future projects using this method of body movement improvisation.

ANA KARIMI

MARIELLE ARCABASCIO: What in-spires your songwriting?

RAVEENA: My songs all come from a really personal, introspective place. I like to write about the woman experience, about power dynamics, about extreme emotional highs and extreme lows, and of course, about love. It’s such a habit for me to translate my emotion through song that it’s become a regular space where I can work through and understand my feelings about certain events in my life.

Songs are also a space where you can ro-manticize and dramatize important mo-ments in your life and look at your world as if you were a character in a movie or a fairytale, which is kind of thrilling. I think it’s every escapist or dreamer’s se-cret pleasure.

My favorite part of the songwriting pro-cess is working with the standard rhyme forms and verse-chorus structures of pop music to create something that feels au-thentic and unique to my experience. I also like to use a lot of imagery relevant and particular to my own experience. It always amazes me that the most person-al details and subtleties of your life that you put into a lyric can resonate with so many people. Writing songs and sharing them with people is always a humbling and unifying experience for me.

MA: Where do you write your lyrics, and does the location impact the song? R: I write my lyrics anywhere and every-where. In the studio, in my bedroom, on the subway, in class. My most personal lyrics always come out when I’m feeling some type of way about something in my life, and then immediately jot down a couple of phrases onto a loose piece of paper or my hand, or more and more, on my iPhone notes. I then hash out the structure of the song when I am writing topline (melody and lyrics) over an in-strumental or a beat, which can happen in the studio, or when I’m working from home.

RAVEENA

MA: How do you come up with the notes?

R: For me, melody and lyrics cannot exist separately from each other. Good songwrit-ers have a really good sense of how a phrase sings, which means making the rhythm of their words match up seamlessly with the beat of the song. I typically write songs in two ways. In the first, I write a few phras-es that feel like they would make a catchy hook for a song, and in these instances, the melody and lyrics almost always come at the same time. In the second way, I receive a beat or an instrumental track and listen to it a couple times until I find the melody that feels ‘right’—and usually a few words will feel right for a hook. Once I determine the right melody and hook for the song, I start writing more verses until I’ve found all the right words and melodies.

MA: How do you categorize yourself as an artist?

R: As a singer-songwriter who can write for a wide variety of genres, but gener-ally sings and write my own music for electronic soul/alternative genres.

MA: What has been vital to your pro-gression as an artist?

R: Falling face down and being in some really tough circumstances that forced me to grow up and understand myself and my surroundings better. An inherent appreciation for beauty and viewing the world through a romantic or escapist lens has also always helped me be the artist that I am. •

CHRISSY REILLY

She was a girl with her thoughts amongst a mil-lion things. A moment crystallized in your mem-ory before being shattered. A face, a collection of twigs, a clean home. Everything and nothing at all in a neat little box. With a pretty bow. Just as you remember it. Materialized through sculpture and photography, repetition and common tactile objects.

dear childhood, i have dreamed of you:

VANESSA CASTRO: How did you get into making these abstract forms? FELICIA DOUGLASS: I’ve always been interested in abstract forms. I used to collect rocks when I was little and crystals. I was into making repetitive, geometric art, 3D shapes and boxes on boxes. VC: It seems very meditative.

FD: Mhm. Hand-drawn patterns—they’re kind of like a game, trying to set your own rules for repetition, and see if you can actually follow through on it. STEPHANIE ECKARDT: Do you ever draw more figuratively, like portraits?

FD: Not really. I’m never really happy with it. If anything, it’s like suggested forms or like something from another world.

SE: Besides the environment, is music an influence? FD: I consider music as a more general influence. Except every piece has a dif-ferent tone and suggestive movement, that’s kind of what I’ll go off of. Like, if the feeling should be static, muted, or expressive and really excited and freeform—that’s kind of all I’ll take for it. SE: How is your process for creating al-bum artwork different from your other work? FD: It’s pretty similar. For the latest al-bum [for Ava Luna], the visual process was more collaborative. SE: So your band-mates looked at what you were doing?

FELICIA DOUGLASS

FD: Yeah. For the other albums it wasn’t really like that. But this is the first album that has a more solid backstory. We all traveled to Mississippi and lived at our friend’s house for a few weeks. But the environment really affected the music that we made. SE: It was more collaborative? FD: Yeah. But I would definitely say that recording those songs in a house in the woods in Mississippi—they wouldn’t have been created if we like recorded them at Silent Barn and stayed there for few weeks. It made people feel different-ly. So for that specific album there were a few guidelines to go off of. SE: But how do you start? Do you listen to the songs while you’re drawing? FD: Sometimes, but I’d say for that it was more about like the vibe of the mu-sic-making process. SE: But you’ve also done it for bands other than your own, right? So how is that different? FD: Yeah, so for that it’s more important to me to like talk to the band about what’s important to them, and their hopes for the work. But usually it’s pretty freeform. For instance, if someone approaches me to work on cover art, they’ve usually seen my work and trust me to kind of just give it a try and see what happens. SE: Since you work in a variety of me-diums, how do you choose which one to use when you’re making art?

VC: It seems like you dabble in a few things.

SE: What makes you write a song about something versus draw it? FD: That’s tough. There are no rules. I don’t sit down and decide to make a painting. I usually start with the structur-al element. I’ll just do like pencil-work. Recently I’ve been getting more into painting, as opposed to just pen, ink-work. But it’s never-ending really, like you can always experiment more. Like trying to sit down and work on a painting as opposed to using colored pencil and pen. SE: How long do you work on projects for before they’re finalized? FD: It totally depends. Sometimes it’ll be really quick. You decide on a few main themes, and then go from there. You don’t have to think much about the form and you have a good feeling about when it’s done. SE: Do you ever start something and then go back to it after an extended pe-riod of time? FD: Yeah, you know since it’s up to you to decide when it’s finished, after awhile you’re like well, I’ll just revisit that. I’m not sure when, but I’ll get to it. And sometimes you don’t.

SE: Do you make everything in your bedroom? Do you have a certain ritual? FD: Not really. Actually a lot of the smaller stuff I’ll make on the train. Or if I’m on tour if I ever have time and I’m not driving. Even though my work is really intricate, I’m never that wor-ried about having to make really straight lines. I feel like if I’m in a moving vehi-cle, it just adds to the organic quality. •

SUMMER UNDERGROUND

GRANT CAREY: We met in high school. CHRISSY SANDMAN: But we didn’t start actually writing together as Sum-mer Underground until we came back from college in the summer. From then on we’ve always worked on breaks from school. Now that we both have graduat-ed, it’s been the more recent, bigger push for this album. MARY HORNAK: Did you each fol-low a particular process before coming together?

GC: Yeah, I think we each were writ-ing songs before we met each other, but we were a lot younger and didn’t really know a lot about what we were doing. It was different at first because no one was hearing the stuff really. There’s a lot more structure to it now. Once we start-ed putting things out that people would hear, that definitely changed the game. CS: Yeah, and technology has really in-fluenced the process too. GC: We did a double EP project called “Departures” and “Arrivals,” which we worked on sporadically. But I was up-state at school, and Chrissy was here in the city in school, so we used Google Drive.

CS: We were addicted to Google Drive.

GC: Our Google Drive was like a city of crap. [laughs] We use it as a place to take notes. We’d kind of build the structure of the album, the songs and everything through Google Drive and Dropbox. CS: The majority of “Departures” and “Arrivals” was recorded in two different places. One person would work on a song and then send it over to the next person to work on it. Actually, it was awesome to receive the files back and see all the changes. That would lead to other ideas for layering the sound, which is also a big part of how our sound has developed, too. GC: That’s a big part of our process, too, that there’s only two of us. I think we want to make music that feels big, so we end up kind of like re-recording, re-re-cording and adding layers. So two people might seem like a small operation, but I guess we try to combat that. MH: How did you react to working far apart and then, now, working together… closer? CS: Well it was kind of funny because the reverse process happened when Grant moved here after he graduated. We had the convenience, for the first time, of being able to play in the same

room together, which was kind of hard at first. Over the past year, we’ve gotten so much better at playing together, and I think it has led to a lot of different and better songwriting because there are op-portunities to rework in real time. The technology—sending back and forth on Dropbox—also has interesting creative limitations. One person had ownership of each individual song when we were sending files back and forth, because they would probably have the structure laid out. Whereas, when we were writing together and recording at the same time here and in Ligonier [Pennsylvania], it was more collaborative. GC: Both processes are great. We prefer being together. MH: When you’re building a song like “Honeycomb,” do you both share an ini-tial idea?

GC: Well Chrissy wrote some parts of that song initially, and that’s where the whole “Honeycomb” idea came from. I don’t remember if I—I must have done this consciously… CS: Recording these memos, sometimes I’m so excited about a new idea or what-ever, I’ll send it over really unfinished for Grant to listen to. I think that in the process of hearing what the other per-son is working on, that it seeps into your own writing, too. So it’s kind of hard to say what parts came before others in that song because I think the ideas just sort of led into each other. GC: What became the verses of “Hon-eycomb” started as just another explora-tion, like sort of a more satirical explo-ration of what you were talking about in your version. At first, it probably felt like “These things don’t go together.”

CS: Anything that you play in sequential order will go together. GC: That’s not necessarily true. CS: But I think it, to some extent, is. I mean, of course, some things wouldn’t, shouldn’t go together but it could… GC: That brings up something inter-esting about being comprised of two songwriters. There is sort of a fine line between writing a song and combin-ing parts of different songs and forcing things together. And with “Honeycomb,” the elements ended up coming together really well. They kind of started as two separate things and then became one. MH: How long does it take for you to get from the initial idea to the final track? GC: You could say it’s taken us since the day we met each other to make this album… In a sense, it’s encompassing everything we’ve learned and everything we’ve gone through together. There’s ac-tually a song on the album where we’re using a baseline and a melodic idea from the first song we ever wrote together. In terms of “Honeycomb,” I think it was pretty much a year, right? CS: Yeah, that idea was started wasn’t finalized until we were in Ligonier try-ing to record it. “Arrivals” came out last October. GC: A lot of the demos for “Honey-comb” are from last fall, early winter. In the spring, we decided that we were going to go to Pennsylvania for a really long time to create a scenario where we had to focus on nothing but the music. Once that was in place, we knew we were about to have a lot of time and a lot of resources to really create something. I

think around that time is when we said “Well, let’s just call it ‘Honeycomb.’” And then, as we made little decisions like that, things started to build naturally. MH: And how did the environment that you were in when you were working on this influence a song that’s so reliant on living in such a crowded area? CS: I am permanently, psychologically changed from this experience. As you’ve noted, it was the exact opposite of New York.

GC: Not looking at the content of the album, which is lyrically exploring a lot of city stuff, it was a perfect place to be just to make music. There weren’t many people around. We had a lot of space, we had a lot of time. It was really beautiful out most of the time and we collaborated with a few people who visited us. It was just really an encouraging and fruitful environment.

In the sense of the lyrics though, it was kind of weird. Like the first song on the album talks about wanting to leave the suburbs and get involved in something bigger, be a small part of a big thing. And there we were, out in the middle of nowhere, doing the opposite. It was almost hard to connect with some of those things, but we ended up record-ing that first song. And it didn’t actually ring true for me again until I was back in New York. But on a technical level, we wouldn’t have been able to make it if we weren’t there. CS: Yeah, I always like when people ask,“What did you do this summer? You were missing in action for over a month and…”

CS: Anything that you play in sequential order will go together. GC: That’s not necessarily true. CS: But I think it, to some extent, is. I mean, of course, some things wouldn’t, shouldn’t go together but it could… GC: That brings up something inter-esting about being comprised of two songwriters. There is sort of a fine line between writing a song and combin-ing parts of different songs and forcing things together. And with “Honeycomb,” the elements ended up coming together really well. They kind of started as two separate things and then became one. MH: How long does it take for you to get from the initial idea to the final track? GC: You could say it’s taken us since the day we met each other to make this album… In a sense, it’s encompassing everything we’ve learned and everything we’ve gone through together. There’s ac-tually a song on the album where we’re using a baseline and a melodic idea from the first song we ever wrote together. In terms of “Honeycomb,” I think it was pretty much a year, right? CS: Yeah, that idea was started wasn’t finalized until we were in Ligonier try-ing to record it. “Arrivals” came out last October. GC: A lot of the demos for “Honey-comb” are from last fall, early winter. In the spring, we decided that we were going to go to Pennsylvania for a really long time to create a scenario where we had to focus on nothing but the music. Once that was in place, we knew we were about to have a lot of time and a lot of resources to really create something. I

think around that time is when we said, “Well, let’s just call it ‘Honeycomb.’” And then, as we made little decisions like that, things started to build naturally. MH: And how did the environment that you were in when you were working on this influence a song that’s so reliant on living in such a crowded area? CS: I am permanently, psychologically changed from this experience. As you’ve noted, it was the exact opposite of New York.

GC: Not looking at the content of the album, which is lyrically exploring a lot of city stuff, it was a perfect place to be just to make music. There weren’t many people around. We had a lot of space, we had a lot of time. It was really beautiful out most of the time and we collaborated with a few people who visited us. It was just really an encouraging and fruitful environment.

In the sense of the lyrics though, it was kind of weird. Like the first song on the album talks about wanting to leave the suburbs and get involved in something bigger, be a small part of a big thing. And there we were, out in the middle of nowhere, doing the opposite. It was almost hard to connect with some of those things, but we ended up record-ing that first song. And it didn’t actually ring true for me again until I was back in New York. But on a technical level, we wouldn’t have been able to make it if we weren’t there. CS: Yeah, I always like when people ask,“What did you do this summer? You were missing in action for over a month and…” GC: “I was living!”

CS: I explain it as: It was the perfect op-portunity to make a lot of noise and not bother other people and vice versa, not have other people’s noise get on the re-cordings. GC: That was a big thing we were ex-cited about before going. We were like, “Wow, we’re going to be really loud and also really quiet. And the sound isn’t gonna be compromised.” So I think, yeah, the environment was great because it allowed us to be so creative and… CS: …We brought a drum kit up there as well, which is something we would never have been able to do. GC: We were really loud. CS: There were a couple nights when no one knew what happened, but we were left with really loud drum recordings that we ended up using on parts of the record. We’ve never been able to capture that type of intensity in some of the moments of the songs, and it was really satisfying. Also, being largely removed from what we were writing about was definitely was part of the experience. GC: It was a great environment for tak-ing risks. Like, if I was doing a vocal tape, and I felt like screaming or being totally fucking weird, I wouldn’t have to think about my roommate or my neighbors, or a car driving by and messing up the tape. It was just a really good environment for really serious fucking around. CS: Yeah, yeah. I actually had a hard time moving back here after recording. I had never felt claustrophobic here be-fore. Living here for the past four years while going to school, I had an amazing time. But then I came back, and it was just so overwhelming for the first time.

It’s just a different contrast, and an effect of intensely focusing on the songs’ con-tent, too. GC: Yeah. We both had a very hard time transitioning back. It was such an unre-ality that it was so pleasant. Doing any-thing after that really felt kind of like a bummer, just because of how intertwined we are with this place and how inter-twined it is with what we kind of try to make in terms of music. MH: And do you see the way that your process has developed for this, do you see that influencing your work in the fu-ture? GC: I think we discovered that what we did—how we recorded this album—was really great, and I would do it again. CS: Absolutely. David Byrne writes about how space and the physical envi-ronment have shaped music tremendous-ly throughout history, and he talks a lot about how we have this cultural idea that music is innate and a sign of internal ge-nius that just comes from either God or pure creativity. He says that the physical environment is just as important in shap-ing the sound, and I think that’s absolute-ly true because I feel like emotion lives in places. This winter, I’m interested in creating something only in my bedroom and embracing the claustrophobia. But I am looking forward to the next group of songs and seeing how being back here shapes them. •

images courtesy of the artists.

interviews have been edited and condensed.

special thanks to:

Lise Friedman

Kelsey McLeod

Open Source Gallery

Arielle and Anessa

Mama