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yikesitskennawrites · 1 year

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Transitions- Chapter Thirty-Eight: Meeting With Strangers

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Pairings: Steven Grant x (platonic) Reader, Marc Spector x (platonic) Reader, Jake Lockley x (platonic) Reader, Layla El-Faouly x (platonic) Reader

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The support group wasn’t in a café but rather a church basement. Layla found the ads for it in a local community page on Facebook, they said that they were welcoming new people every week despite the days shortening from three times a week to once. You think they shortened the days because there weren't many people showing up. It sketched you out that the only entrance into the basement was down a short hill next to the church, there is only one window and that's on the door. It was old and dirty, with dust lining the edge of it and pine needles resting precariously on it. The glass was stained with blue, red, yellow, and green pieces all cut into little sharp edges and splayed out in a collage that doesn’t make any familiar patterns.

The door was cracked open to show that they were still waiting for people, but not wide enough to let all of the cold October air into the room. There was a small parking lot large enough to fit at least six cars. The parking spaces were full and there were a couple of cars parked on the edge of the slope that leads to the city below. The only entrance was the same hill Layla drove down on her scooter which also sketched you out because that meant it was the only exit too. If you needed to get away it was going to be difficult to get out. Layla and you sat on her Vespa in the middle of the concrete parking area. Your hands and face are cold and you know that you’re going to have a runny nose by the time that you wake up tomorrow.

The helmet she let you borrow was resting on your head with the straps snapped together and snug against the underside of your jaw. It was due to rain tonight and she offered to take you there and back to her place without any complaint. She told you that she was going to wait at a café that was about two miles away just so she would be out of the rain if it begins to pour while you’re still in the meeting. She said she’ll even share her location with you if the sight of seeing where she was will put you at ease. The weatherman said it won’t rain until eight o’clock tonight and it was nearing six pm but sometimes the weather was wrong and it rained earlier than expected.

Either way, she was getting out of the cold weather and you can’t blame her for wanting to be warm. You were shivering in the clothes that Jake packed for you, today's outfit consists of a sweatshirt with a sweater underneath and two layers of sweatpants on your legs along with a pair of thermal socks and regular socks underneath that. The sweatshirt has the logo of the Chicago Cubs baseball team with a hole in the sleeve, you think it got caught on a door handle and ripped open. You wonder if they have any warm clothes to wear for the cold weather to come or if they gave it all to you.

“You ready, table thief?” She asks you, peeking over her shoulders as she rests her hands on your own that's wrapped around her waist. You’ve been sitting outside in the cold for awhile, the meeting wasn’t until six and you watched a few people enter the building and chatted like old friends outside of it. Layla decided to leave the apartment early just in case there was some traffic and to make sure that you wouldn’t awkwardly walk into the first meeting late. But, either way, you are going to feel anxious walking into a room full of strangers especially without Layla by your side. It makes you a little nervous to know that you are a new person joining this meeting when some of these people may have known each other for years or months. They have some form of history with each other while you have nothing.

What if- when they ask you to tell them your name and talk about your experience- that they decide that they don’t like you? What if they decide that your experience is too different and not like theirs at all? What if they kick you out and to the curb because you’re too much?

“Baby?” She says, this time she turns as far as her torso will allow her to see you more clearly. You don’t know what you look like at the moment, but whatever it is, it causes her to frown at the sight. “What’s wrong?” You bite your lip at her question before huffing out a breath and trailing your gaze to the damp ground below you. It already rained today, it was supposed to continue later. There is no use in hiding how nervous you are with her, she can tell when something is bothering you and she won’t stop snooping until you tell her. You might as well just tell her now instead of letting her worry for you and push you about it later.

She’ll probably assume that you’re thinking of hurting yourself since you admitted to her that you want to die two days ago. You are her new roommate until you are deemed no longer suicidal and maybe even after that. You saw a couple of tabs open on her tablet about how to approach someone who wants to kill themselves when you woke up from your nap on Sunday. You haven’t gotten a lot of sleep since your nightmares wake you so most of the time you are on autopilot and staring blankly at the television screen until she jolts you back to reality.

The bathroom door and her bedroom door no longer have a lock on them; and she took you to the hardware store yesterday to get a spare key for herself in case you lock her out of the apartment to end your life in it. You don’t want her to feel like she doesn’t have any privacy in her home, so you need to get past the whole ordeal of her believing that every moment that you’re quiet, you are thinking of ending things.

“What if they don’t like me?” You ask. The question sounds stupid to your own ears as you say it aloud. Her face softens.

“Is that what you’re really worried about?” She asks gently and you nod. “Oh baby, they aren’t going to dislike you as soon as you walk through that door.” She squeezes your hand. “They won’t even be thinking about anything like that.”

“You don’t know that.” You point out. Some people just automatically dislike other people simply because of how they are dressed. There was this girl in your middle-school who hated you because on the first day of school you picked a desk that she wanted to sit in. You refused to move all year long even when she called you mean names and laughed with her friends at you whenever you passed in the halls. Some people just dislike others because they are petty, sure you could have moved and let her have the desk next to her best friend; but she also could have just sat in one period without being next to her friend and get over it.

She gives you a look and you sigh as she asks, “Are you just nervous?” You bite the inside of your cheek and trail your eyes to the gray clouds above the two of you. “On a scale of one to ten, how anxious are you feeling?” That's the seventh time she has asked you that since Sunday. You think she picked it up from one to the articles she read on how to handle situations like this one. How to help a teenager who wants to hurt themselves. You know that one of the first Google searches pops up the international suicide helpline and followed by the United Kingdoms emergency number. But after that is the repetitive same thing in each article, let them know that they are loved and safe, and ask them a bit about how they are feeling while giving them words of affirmation.

“Six.” You tell her and she hums. You both had a conversation two days ago about what each number means, one being the lowest at risk for self-harm and ten being the highest to want to hurt yourself. Even if you were going to kill yourself, you probably wouldn’t tell her as bad as that sounds. You just wanted to be away from here and to be laying on her couch with her fingers tangled in yours as you watch some rom-com, even if that means seeing the blurry eyes of the teen stare at you from behind the darkest corner of the living-room. You’ve convinced yourself that everything you see out of the corner of your eye is the teenager or the man you killed and they are watching you, making you feel guilty for breathing. You have yet to tell her this but, you think she's catching on because you sometimes find her looking at you and back to the corner.

Another thing she did since you moved in with her, she banned dark media from the apartment until you are stable enough to watch it without her- and you- feel like you’re triggered to overthink. But that doesn’t seem to matter because here you are, overthinking about how you’re going to walk into the church basement and be automatically disliked.

“I see you. I hear you.” She says. “Why are you rating yourself as a six?” You shrug at first without really thinking about it. It kind of feels embarrassing to have this conversation with her.

“I don’t feel bad enough to go any higher and I don’t feel great enough to go lower.” You mumble.

“What do you think you’re going to rate yourself after this meeting?”

“Hopefully lower than a six.” You tell her and she smiles a bit at that.

“I think you’ll be a three, maybe even a two.” She says. You blink tiredly at her and she holds your eyes for a moment before gesturing for you to make your way into the meeting. “You have about three minutes to get into the building, not too late and not too early.” She smiles. You both sat in the parking lot for about ten minutes and during that whole time you were trying to work up the courage to go inside so neither of you are sitting in the cold for long. Your legs stretch as you stand from the scooter and she reaches up for your face and unclasps the helmet. Her cold gloves brush against your skin and it causes you to shiver a bit.

“If you need me, I’m just a phone call away,” She promises. “I have my location on and I’ll even text you when I get to the cafe so you won’t worry if the location is glitched or something.” You glance away from her, your eyes landing on a puddle with the reflection of the sky and some pine needles resting at the bottom of it along with a few pebbles.

“I’m not…” You start and stop, taking a breath to steady yourself before continuing. “I’m not suffocating you, am I?” She does have some breathing room, right? Marc told you he wanted that and then…everything else happened. Her smile falls slightly and she shakes her head.

“Not at all, table thief.” She says. “I have your number and you have mine. If you need anything-”

“You’re a phone call away.” You finish. You don’t know if you would call her if you did actually need something or were in danger. You take off the helmet and hold it between your hands. She turns on the Vespa and it rumbles loudly for a moment before tuning down a bit.

“Call me,” She says. “Really. I mean it. There's nothing wrong in asking for help.” In other words, don’t take something into your own hands that you can’t deal with later. Don’t do something stupid because you feel like you can’t reach out for anyone. You nod and swallow before forcing yourself to turn on your heels and walk to the door. You squeeze yourself through the crack and blink away the brightness of the room.

Above you a row of white lights hung from the ceiling and led to a slightly more open room of six people sitting in a circle of eight chairs while two people chatted by small snack bar. A coffee pot and a plate of cookies rest on the table cloth. The walls are colored a mint green and rough with small bumps like the ceiling at Layla's. A bald man stands from the folding chair he sat in. He wears a light blue button up dress shirt and a pair of khaki pants and black dress shoes. He smiles and it looks genuine even as he holds his arms wide and welcomes you in with open arms.

“Hello,” He greets and holds out his hand. “My name is Henry and I run the support group. You must be…” He trails off and gives you the chance to introduce yourself. You do, your name falling out of your mouth and into the dusty air that smells like coffee and apple-cinnamon candles. The soft orange glow in the corner of your eye catches your attention, you glance at it and see the air freshener diffuser plugged into an outlet. Ever since the mall, whenever you go into a new place, you have the overwhelming need to scope everything out and try to keep an eye on everything at once. You became so stressed in the hardware store yesterday that Layla thought you were having a panic attack. He says something else but, you’re not really listening as you try to take in the new place.

Your eyes land on the wall of slightly rusted metal folding chairs leaning against it as Henry walks towards them with his long legs and grabs a seat for you. He snaps it open and sets it between a teenage girl who looks to be fifteen and staring down at her phone and a woman with graying streaks in her brown hair whose legs are crossed under the other. Almost all the adults in the room are dressed in some form of work attire. Some were dressed in slacks and collar shirts and others were wearing pencil skirts or dresses reaching their knees. A couple of people wore gym clothing and were slightly drench either from sweat or the downpour not too long ago. Two others were wearing casual attire.

The girl you sat next to is wearing a school uniform, one with a plaid skirt that reaches her knees and a pair of black dress shoes and neon tights, the top two buttons of her shirt were undone. Her black hair curled down her back and her brown eyes stayed on the glowing phone in her lap. Your own phone vibrates in your pocket and you dig it out after setting the helmet on the floor in front of you. Clutching the slightly warm case in your hands as you read the confirmation text message Layla sent you. I’m at the café followed by a pin of her location. You sent her back a smiley face despite not feeling very happy at the moment before putting it back into your pants pocket.

Behind you, you can hear the two women gossiping about the mall and the estimated tally of the dead, twenty-six. The identities of the victims haven’t been released yet, but one of the women stated that their co-worker's daughter was in the mall and they are dead. You feel your throat close in on itself and you turn your gaze to the old blue carpet and make yourself focus on a stain in it. Twenty-six people, you killed twenty-six people and that's not even confirmed but estimated. Layla refused to let you watch the news because they’ve been airing updates on the events of the mall since this rarely happens in the United Kingdom; and you understood why because she was worried you’ll get triggered and do something irrational. But, it seems to not matter whether you watch the news or not because of these two people gossiping behind you.

You know that they don’t know how big of a role you played in the events that unfolded Saturday, but still you can’t help but feel like their eyes were burning holes into the back of your head as they talked. They know, there's no fucking way that they don’t, you think. Your stomach twists and you think the food you ate for lunch and managed to keep down until now was beginning to try to show its appearance. Your hands shake as you clutch the seat and you try to look as normal as possible. You think everyone in the room is staring at you, thinking about how you killed twenty-six people and you are in a support group looking for help. You don’t deserve it and they are aware that you don’t deserve it. Your grip tightens on the seat as the room begins to spin. You need to get out of here, you need to call Layla.

Your breath catches in your throat as you listen to the women pass you and sit in their respective seats. Layla will be disappointed if you were to call her, she will hate that you couldn’t even get through the first five minutes of the meeting. It will give her even more of a reason to hate you. You try to calm yourself and relax your muscles. One meeting, you think, just one meeting and then you can tell Layla that you tried it and it’s not for you. You try to steady your breathing before you burst into a panic attack. One meeting, you breathe in slowly. One meeting, you exhale. Just one meeting and then you can look at other options. Inhale, exhale. One meeting and these people will never see your face again. Inhale, exhale. One meeting, just this one.

You breathe out slowly, the room is no longer spinning and it doesn’t feel like everyone's eyes are glaring at you. You shift your gaze away from the stain in the rug and to the man who greeted you just moments ago speaks softly and steady into the room. “Welcome back everyone and welcome to those who are new.” He says, “We have a couple of new familiar faces in the room as you can see, and they are nervous just like you were when you first showed up. Please welcome them with open arms and give them the support that you’ll like to receive from them.”

He pauses and looks around, “Who wants to go first?” Your name falls from his lips as his eyes land on you, a small smile spreads across his face and you think he’s meaning to be comforting. “Do you want to go first?” You press your lips together and shake your head, you were already too nervous to even think about going first.

“I will,” A red head man sitting across from you raises his hand a bit. He looks to be about in his forties, perhaps in the middle of it. His beard was short, a bit longer than stubble and his green eyes glow brightly in the lighting as he says, “Most of you already know my name, for those who don’t, my name is Oliver and I was snapped.” A soft breeze blows through the cracks of the door and it makes you shiver. Does this place not have any heating? Your eyes trail over to the stained glass window on the door as you listen to him speak, “My wife at the time, fell in love with someone else. Someone much younger than I am. It’s funny because he looks exactly like I did when I was in my first year of university decades ago.”

Oh man that sucks. You watch as the rain hits the window, running down the glass in streaks as he says, “Mary- my therapist- says that in times of grief we look back to the times that we find comfort and solace in. Sometimes we surround ourselves with smells, or food, and I guess my wife found her comfort in a familiar looking young man.” He pauses, “We’re no longer married but, when I came back it was like a blink. It felt like I just blinked and for everyone else who stayed, they had five years to come to the terms that we weren’t coming back.” He swallows, “It felt like she no longer wanted me within a blink.”

You felt bad for him, you didn’t experience the loss of a partner within moments but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel upset for him. You can’t imagine coming back and realizing that your partner is in love with someone who looks like you from when you were younger. The rain drops steaks down the glass window and combine to make one line, you keep your eyes trained on the water droplets as you listen.

“We got a divorce within a few months after trying to get that spark back.” He says, “She didn’t feel the same as before I was gone...” He trails off and leans back in his seat. You turn your gaze over to him and watch him cross his arms over his chest.

“You tried to mend your relationship with her and it didn’t work out,” Henry says. “The best that you can do is try; and you do try everyday that you wake up and decide to start your day. I’m proud of you for doing so.” He smiles softly, “Who’s next?”

Your eyes are still on Oliver, he was looking down at something on the old blue carpet. You think he��s staring at the stain, trying to steady himself as you did not too long ago. The movement of the man next to him raising his hand slightly, catches your eyes and you look at him. He wore a green plaid flannel and his brown hair was damp and curly, you don’t think he has brushed it; or if he has, he ran his hands through it so much that it made it messy. His brown beard was shorter than Oliver's, it was closer to stubble than a beard now that you were thinking of it.

“My name is George and my nan died in her home.” He says, rubbing his chin as he speaks in a soft tone, “My family and I were taking care of her. She was about ninety and, uh, she had to have someone check on her at least three times a day since she was getting old and forgetting things. She lost almost all of her hand strength, so she couldn’t open up any of her heart medication.” He swallows and you turn your gaze away from and to his feet wrapping around the back of the front legs of the chair he sits in. You watch as his jeans rise slightly with the movement, showing the white sock he is wearing.

“Then the snap happened and both of my dads and my sister and I- we,” He coughs slightly. “We were gone….there was nobody around in our family to take care of my nan. Nobody really knew about her condition except us and she…died. Alone.” He adds the last part after a long moment. “She, um, probably had no idea what happened. She- my nan- she wasn’t the best with social media, didn’t even know how to use the cell phone we bought her the Christmas before and it was one of those big ones for the elderly. The ones with the big screen and bold letters and symbols for what is what on the keypad. She must have thought that we just stopped showing up.” He lets out a shuddering breath and leans forward a bit to rest his arms on his legs.

Oliver reaches out and pats his back reassuringly. Henry says something, but you’re more focused on George taking breaths of air to steady himself to listen to him. You didn’t realize you were copying his breathing until you felt the cold air fill your lungs and burn them as you slowly release it. You haven’t really thought about the elderly, the disabled, and the children that were left without anyone to care for them during the five years everyone was gone. You were more focused on the things that you lost rather than the stuff people had to go through during the snap. You shift a little in your seat and the all too familiar feeling of guilt pooling in your stomach.

There's people that survived the snap and lost everything, they lost their loved ones and friends, they lost their homes, and they built a life without expecting people to come back. They tried to move one and continue in a world without the people they love and when everyone came back you can’t imagine how they felt. Your aunt must have been so ecstatic before she received the news that her sister and brother-in-law are dead and their kid is presumed dead too. You are the only tie left to her sister and she doesn’t even know you are alive. You are the only blood related and breathing person who is the offspring of her sister and she thinks that you are dead. You are a selfish human being. You always have been selfish from the start, your actions of the last two years have just proven that.

“Hello, my name is Cecilia and I have been highlighting my hair to look as old as I should be.” The woman next to you speaks and it causes you to jump a bit in your chair, “I’ve been doing it for about two years now. I should be fifty-four but don’t tell anyone that.” You force out a short laugh to make it look like you are okay, but it doesn’t seem to matter because the others cover up the noise with their own laughter and are too distracted by her own joke.

“Cecilia, you don’t look a day over fifty.” Oliver says. She waves him off with a small smile as you blink. You curl your fingers inward to form a fist, your nails dig into your palm and the pain of it grounds you momentarily. You breathe in slowly, letting the air fill your lungs and expand your chest before holding it for a few seconds and releasing.

“Thank you, but that’s the opposite of where I want to be.” She says, “On my mothers side of the family, a lot of us get graying hair early among other things, and I don’t have it at all; or maybe I do. Samantha is a really good stylist.” She smiles a bit bitterly, “But when I was snapped and came back, I didn’t have any visible grays.” She pauses, “My sister she was three years younger than me before I was snapped and she had grays just beginning to show. Now she's fifty-four and I’m fifty-one. I was supposed to be the older sibling and now she is, her hair naturally has gray streaks and is not artificial...” She trails off.

“My therapist says that I’m trying to cope with being the younger sibling by dyeing my hair. Like a teenager having a crisis when they do something impulsive like get bangs or bleach their hair. For me, she says that I may be trying to be the older sister again or getting some form of control.” She says. “I was supposed to be the older sister forever.” You decide not to point out that she would only be the older sibling unless her sibling died. But, you get what she was trying to say, you are the only child your parents had but you get it with your cousins. They were supposed to be younger than you and now they are in college and married.

You look back to the stained glass windows, the rain was still pouring and streaking down it. You watch it for a few moments, trying not to cry as you think about all the selfish shit you have done since you came back from the blip. You committed fraud and moved continents making your living relatives and best friend believe you are dead. You tricked your neighbors, Layla, and Lauren into caring for you so you wouldn’t get jailed for fraud. You killed twenty-six people and that number might be higher since it's only estimated to be that many. You killed a man because you didn’t want to lose your neighbors and Layla.

Yet, here you are, nearly on the brink of tears in a church basement looking for support and maybe even forgiveness for your selfish actions. You are so fucking selfish that you don’t deserve anything or anyone. You are looking for forgiveness when you took people's lives who won’t ever get to see the same constellations you see in the night sky. You swallow roughly as Henry says something you’re not listening to until he speaks your name. You blink, tearing your burning gaze away from the colorful window and to him. He offers a too kind smile that makes the lump in your throat feel like it's a golf-ball and you’re choking on it. You’re a fraud, you’re a fraud, you’re a fraud, you’re a fraud, you’re a fraud, you’re a fraud, you’re a fraud, you’re a fraud.

“Are you ready to share your story?” He asks you. You should have been expecting to be asked but it still surprises you nonetheless. You don’t feel like you can speak without crying so you shake your head. You hope that nobody recognizes how close you are to breaking down. You don’t want their pity. You don’t deserve their pity.

“That’s alright,” He tells you, the smile still resting on his face and never wavering. “Not everybody tells their story on the first day. Some find it more comforting to listen in on others' experiences until they are ready.”

“It took me about a month to tell mine.” Oliver pitches in, your eyes trail away from Henry and to him. “You’ll get there, kid.”

“I think a week or two for me.” Cecilia adds, she places a hand on your knee before removing it after a moment. Her touch leaves a warm spot on your knee and you think she pulled away because she’s afraid you’ll poison her too.

“You’re going to get there. It gets easier the more you talk about it. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt any less, it just gets easier to breathe through.” She smiles at you, the corner of her eyes crinkling and her brown eyes bright. You nod, letting them know that you hear them and that you see them; and they seem satisfied with that as they turn their attention to someone else who begins to speak about their experience.

You tune them out as your eyes trail back to the colorful window. You don’t feel like you fit in, you are forever in the role of an outcast looking in and it’s probably best to keep you in that position. Everything you touch gets poisoned or killed and it is just a matter of time before it turns on yourself. Besides, you’re not worthy enough to spill your grief after everything that you have done. You watch the rain trail down the glass once again and feel a familiar streak run down your cheek.

—

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trashworldblog · 13 days

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Hi!

I hope ur well.

Anyway I wanted to know if u have any accomidations in ur college for your disablitie? It seems you are constantly in pain and could use some extra help? (PLS CORRECT ME IF IM WRONG) I see ur posts about ur disablites and I can't help but feel sympathy, I know some of what your going through (my ass has been on meds as well as being in and out of hospitals my whole life)

I don't know what your collage could offer and such but I hope you at get some extra help bc everyone should have a good college experience and not have to cry in front of professors bc of pain and stress.

I hope you are better in the next few days. And I hope u get some good vitimin D (Illinois is cloudy as shit rn).

hi!! thanks for checking in !! yeah my school provides accommodations. its just hard as fuck to do (paperwork, doctors signatures, etc) and i havent had the time or energy to do it yet. im hoping to get flexible due dates and have flexible attendance? also just a general understanding that if im uncontactable its cus im in bed, in pain, with nausea. (or asleep due to meds). i have 2 game studio classes coming up so i get to break it to them that im chronically ill yayyy

having a disability is fucking hard! and its been hard to figure out how to communicate that to professors and classmates in a ~chill regular people way~ because beep beep im also autistic and have no clue if im over or undersharing. luckily i was able to express it in a semi normal ish way with a 1 on 1 w the prof for the class thats really been rough because of my disability. (the tldr is i worked on a big and cool project w a client, and had to be in contact with my team for updates, and due to my disability i would disappear for half a week cus i was busy passing out in doctors offices and sleeping due to pain meds) but i was always able to do good fucking work! just couldnt message people all the time 💀 the meeting went well, i didnt actually cry cry, my voice got all wobbly and i made that noise you make when youre TRYING not to cry a few times. honestly i was confused as to why i got emotional cus i thought i was over it. clearly not lol. she was very understanding and nice too. she wished i brought it up sooner but tbh this all unfolded during the semester, and i was new(ish) to chronic illness so i didnt know what to do or how to approach that.

overall my college experience has been very good, this is a rough bit of it. and i find it helpful to write about it.

i wouldnt say im constantly in pain, it comes and goes every few days. and even then, everyday theres at least some pressure/pain for a few seconds and on bad days theres times when it goes away for a few minutes every hour. she's very dynamic.

sorry to hear you also get the medical struggles <3 hope you are well and your meds work well for you. and thank you for the well wishes. today was pretty nice! low pain, and it was actually sunny and warm in chicago! i got to escape to the lakefront for a while and listen to the waves break and the birds chirp

#i cant wait for the semester to be over. absolutely praying that this goes away when stress goes away #jupiter posting #thanks for the ask!

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livethrushit · 11 months

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Signs From the Disabled LGBTQIA+ Community: submission by yours truly, @maghrebipunk / @pqdj_archive (ig) livethrushit (tumblr) Jamie Riley, they/he is out of Chicago & Providence.

I made this sign feeling like the lgbtqia+ community was disrespecting our history by excluding/overlooking/being hostile towards those of us that are sick and disabled. I read the book ‘Let the Record Show’ a comprehensive look at what activist groups, namely ACT UP!, did to fight the Regan era negligence and deliberate death sentences. There’s so much we should be learning from them; there are so many wonderful disability advocates teaching and creating new ways of caring for each other through covid. but everyone is exhausted, distressed, and running on empty. The larger lgbtqia+ community has a moral, ethical legacy to uphold by caring for us and i’m just not seeing it. It’s hard. I send all my love to disabled and chronically ill community members this pride month.

Signs From the Disabled LGBTQIA+ Community is a project showcasing signs made by disabled LGBTQIA+ community members who feel left behind by the larger queer community. Especially by making pride and queer events inaccessible and not covid safe. All of us deserve to have our voices heard even if we can’t be at an event. All of us deserve community safety.

Submissions are open all month! DM me or send an email. Share with your friends who aren’t on IG. Let me know your name (or how you want to be credited), pronouns, general location if you’d like, and a small blurb if you have one. If you need the email lmk. You do Not need to be Jewish to submit. At the end of the month these submissions will be made into a collage.

#my artwork #collage art #collage #pqdjarchive #disability #chronic illness #pride2023 #mask up #covid isn't over #jamie riley

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kolajmag · 8 months

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THIS WEEK AT KOLAJ MAGAZINE

Billboards, Folklore, & Archéologie Surréaliste

COLLAGE ON VIEW Word of Mouth: Folklore, Collage & Community at A' the Airts in Sanquhar, Scotland, United Kingdom

COLLAGE EVENTS Community Collage Nights at A’ the Airts in Sanquhar, Scotland, United Kingdom

FROM THE PRINT ISSUE Billboard: Disparities

COLLAGE ON VIEW Archéologie Surréaliste at the Cuest'Art Festival in Virton, Belgium

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venusstadt · 1 year

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Are the kids alright?

According to recent news reports, they seem to be anything but, especially the girls. Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study that found that in 2021, almost three in five girls in high school considered suicide (Ghorayshi and Rabin), a number that has increased by 60% in ten years (Twenge).

Overall, the mental health of teenagers in the U.S.—already burdened by concerns about climate change and school shootings—only worsened thanks to pandemic-induced anxiety and isolation (Webster). This, of course, is on top of things such as figuring out their own individual identities (Webster).

If there’s anything that last week’s discourse surrounding Sydney Sweeney has proven, is that tween and teen girls have always had a rather tough time navigating that weird space between childhood and adulthood, that space where puberty feels like a mortal sin and any legitimate questions and concerns one might have about themselves or the world around them are blithely dismissed or treated as heresy.

But there was once a host of places where tween and teen girls could find some relief from the world at large and commune with their peers away from the gazes of those that sought to mock them. And, believe it or not, one of these spaces was online.

Hi, and welcome to Venusstadt. I’m Jiana. Today, I’m filming with my webcam in true early internet fashion to discuss Rookie, the feminist-leaning magazine founded by a teen for teens and tweens to give them a place to share their thoughts and creativity amid a society in which girls and girlhood were treated as nuisances.

TAVI GEVINSON

First, let’s discuss Tavi Gevinson.

Tavi, the youngest of three, was born in 1996 in Chicago. Her father was an English teacher, while her mother taught Hebrew and weaved (Knight).

Usually in a biography you would hear details like early childhood or adolescent experiences that led to the subject’s choice of career. However, Tavi is unique in that her career started when she was a child, and that that career was one that she chose herself.

Tavi became interested in fashion when she started to make collages in fourth grade out of pictures she cut out of magazines (Widdicombe). She first discovered blogging at a slumber party, when she was shown the personal site of her friend’s older sister, who also enjoyed fashion (Widdicombe). Tavi then used Blogspot to start her own site in 2008, calling it “Style Rookie” to fit in with the trending fashion blogs of the time (Vogue, YouTube, 1:10).

Through her posts, she documented her personal style, her thoughts on runway shows, and random anecdotes from her tween life. She was eventually propelled into the spotlight of the wider fashion industry when New York Magazine wrote a short article about her and her blog, appropriately titled “Meet Tavi, the 12-Year-Old Fashion Blogger” (Kwan).

Tavi’s initial rise to fame came at a time where people were really beginning to pay attention to the potential of the internet. Along with social media sites like MySpace and Facebook, which were already rather popular, people also began to read and start blogs (cite). These bloggers, who were in every niche from politics to mommy blogging to art, were basically proto-influencers. With Tavi also came Bryanboy, Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, and Tommy Ton of Jak + Jil, all apart of the fashion blogosphere that was viewed as “democratizing” the industry, since it shifted some of the authority away from traditional sources like journalist and established critics to people who more closely resembled the average consumer (Widdicombe).

However, Tavi was unique due to the fact that she was like, 12 (Widdicombe). This, combined with her pretty impressive knowledge of fashion and culture and the mature, conversational tone with which she reportedly wrote, made her a spectacle to the adults of the fashion press (Widdicombe). Her youth also gave her the gusto to wear what she wanted as opposed to adhering to traditional fashion rules.

By 13, Tavi was sitting front row at various fashion shows (“Japan Goes Mad for 13-year-old,” The Cut). She attended John Galliano’s Spring 2010 Dior couture, where she met Karl Lagerfeld and Rei Kawakubo (Widdicombe). Later, she would also be the guest of honor at a holiday party for the latter’s brand Commes des Garcon (“Japan Goes Mad for 13-year-old,” The Cut).

While there were many who liked Tavi, she also had her fair share of detractors. Take, for instance, Sarah Mower of the Telegraph, who wrote of recognizing Tavi at the Dior show with a “sick lurch” and fantasized about yelling at Tavi’s father (Widdicombe). Ann Slowey, then fashion news director for Elle, questioned Tavi’s age and the likelihood that Style Rookie was actually written by her, while FIT’s Valerie Steele asserted that no one would care about Tavi if not for her age (Widdicombe). Tavi admitted that the attention got to be too much occasionally; when New York Magazine first brought attention to her blog, she even took a brief break from the internet (Widdicombe). According to Tavi:

“A lot of people on the internet have a problem with a young person doing well. I felt like, there were a lot of people who were there [in fashion spaces] because of their name, their money, or their family, and I didn’t have any of those things” (Kane).

Outside of her blog and media appearances, Tavi was still pretty much a normal tween, making collages and DIYs, attending public school with her peers, and shopping around at various thrift and vintage stories (Widdicombe). At the same time, she was speaking at conferences and guest writing for publications, using the money she earned from that to buy herself an occasional designer item (Widdicombe).

As with most young people, Tavi’s interests eventually changed, and she began to take less interest in fashion than she did with subjects such as “outsider art, feminism, gender identity, and media” (Knight).

ROOKIE MAGAZINE

As I mentioned in depth in my previous video essay on Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, children are seen as unsophisticated blank slates that can be trained to uphold pre-existing standards, and therefore must be rigorously surveilled and molded for the interest of wider society (O’Connor 4). “Children” here includes teenagers, who, since the category was invented by marketers in the 1950s, have been sites of anxiety and have represented social decline with their necking mobiles and rebellious attitudes (Thompson).

The concept of the “tween,” which denotes young people between eight and fourteen, was also invented by marketers in the early 90s (Guthrie 1). Newsweek in the late 90s described tweens as a “generation in fast forward, in a fearsome hurry to grow up” (Guthrie 1). Guthrie notes that “tween” was a label typically restricted to girls, who apparently felt more pressure to act older than their ages than boys were. Quoting Judith Halberstrom, Guthrie writes that:

“Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in a male-dominated society. If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage […] and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power, for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression” (Guthrie 2).

I don’t believe I have to go into great depth explaining how media can be used to enforce social norms, but there are numerous examples involving media censorship (such as the Hays Code or the current Florida Book Bans) that demonstrate how industries or governments can use the media to maintain a certain status quo.

In their article “Narrative Analysis of [...] Etiquette in Teenage Magazines,” Ana C. Garner, Helen M. Stark, and Shawn Adams highlight a plethora of studies that demonstrated how teens put a lot of weight onto teen-oriented magazines as arbiters of taste and social etiquette (3). These magazines were often the go-to source as opposed to their parents due to their accessibility and ability to be read in private (Garner 3).

Magazines for teen girls largely included content that, you guessed it, promoted the standard gendered social norms expected of young women, such as how to dress, how to use makeup, and how to get the attention of boys (Garner 2). These articles and advertisements played an important role in the acculturation process of the young women who read them, in that they provided a specific set of cultural expectations that the girls figured they were expected to meet in order to be proper women. As stated by Garner, Stark, and Adams:

“…women’s magazines play a socializing function through the stories they tell in columns, features, and advertising. Readers encounter and then may initiate cultural myths of identity. According to Kellner, ‘Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture.’ Magazines constitute part of the media stories that shape both society’s sense of culture and our sense of self in culture” (Garner 2).

Though such advice on makeup and boys might be helpful on an individual basis, such dictates could serve to be confusing at a time where a young girl is attempting to figure out her own identity, and did not really answer any of the questions a lot of girls would have about adolescence and adulthood (Guthrie 6). This is where Rookie magazine came in, but before we discuss Rookie, we ought to discuss Sassy.

Sassy was a teen magazine that was published from 1988 to 1996. It was notable for being a feminist teen magazine that spoke about serious subjects like suicide and STDs at a time where, again, most teen girl magazines were instructed girls on how to maximize their appearances in order to get dates (Talk of the Nation). Sassy drew a lot of ire from evangelical groups who boycotted it when it first started, which made advertisers not really want to touch it after a while (Talk of the Nation). It eventually stopped publishing and was absorbed into ‘TEEN magazine…which just talked about boys and dating again.

In spring 2010, Tavi mentioned on Style Rookie that she wanted to create a magazine inspired by Sassy and the riot grrrl zines of the 1990s, which were key parts of the third-wave feminist movement (Knight; Feliciano). Founding editor of Sassy Jane Pratt then reached out to make that happen (Knight).

At first Gevinson was in talks to sign on with Say Media to make this idea come to life, but she ultimately decided to pursue her idea independently so that “the man” wasn’t involved (Knight). According to Tavi’s father Steve, Rookie was independently financed “on family borrowing” (Knight).

Rookie first launched in September 2011 as Tavi entered her sophomore year of high school, filling the void that Sassy left in the teen publication industry when it shut down in 1996. In her first Editor’s letter, Tavi asserted that unlike other magazines like Teen Vogue or Seventeen, Rookie:

“…is not your guide to Being a Teen. It is not a pamphlet on How to Be a Young Woman. It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in. While there’s always danger in generalizing a whole group of people, I do think some experiences are somewhat universal to being a teenager, specifically a female one. Rookie is the place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringeworthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl” (Gevinson).

If you look at Rookie’s visual aesthetic throughout the years, you can definitely see how the riot grrrl zines also influenced it. The whole site had a whole DIY/collage aesthetic. As stated previously, riot grrrl was a major part of the third-wave feminist movement (Feliciano); Huse states that its zines were so important and impactful because they gave girls “an outlet for their own stories, a means to reclaim culture and language through their writing, and the ability to critique mainstream media with their own publication” (Huse 12).

That pretty much also describes Rookie’s primary draw. Like Sassy and its riot grrrl foremothers, Rookie magazine served as a way for teens to read about and discuss serious topics like birth control, mental health, and coming out in a safe space where they would not be shamed or ridiculed (Wilson). It was also feminist-leaning without the terminology that might be found in a Gender and Women's Studies textbook or journal. This meant that the language used was simple and more accessible, allowing progressive concepts to be shared with a younger audience (Kane).

Rookie also featured a pretty wide range of content, from interviews with artists, authors, and celebrities; to short fiction and poetry, film and literature reviews, DIY and personal style guides, cool playlists and illustrations—basically anything a teen might want. Much of this content was submitted by its tween and teen readers (Wilson), and submitting to Rookie was much like submitting to any other magazine. Each month there was a specific theme, and Rookie gave potential contributors ideas of what they could send in. There was also a poetry roundup, where Rookie would publish a bunch of submitted poetry each month. Of course, all submissions had to be unpublished, and Rookie rigorously fact-checked any non-fiction pieces. What was most impressive to me was that they took their young contributors seriously by compensating them for their work and creativity, though it was never officially disclosed how much they paid. The first three themes of Rookie were Beginnings, Secrets, and Girl Gang in September, October, and November of 2011; the last three were Rebirth, Spirit, and Evolution in the same months of 2018.

Advice questions could be sent in at any time. These questions could be answered in columns like “Ask a Grown Man” and “Ask a Grown Woman,” which allowed teens to ask various celebrities for advice (Kane). Celebrities who participated in this included Cyndi Lauper, Paul Rudd, Terry Crews, and even Hillary Clinton during her 2016 election campaign.

The website updated only three times a day, all in the afternoon when teens would be most apt to actually read the content: “after school, at dinner time, and when it’s really late and you should be writing a paper but are Facebook stalking instead” (Wilson).

The Rookie staff consisted of Tavi, a few grown people who handled the business and some of the editing, and other teen staff like Petra Collins, Hazel Cills, Arabelle Sicardi, and more. Staff members largely interacted with each other online via email and social media, but they occasionally met up for events like Rookie Road Trip, which was a four-week long tour in which teen staff members and Anaheed Alani packed into a van and drove across country from New York to Los Angeles to promote Rookie Yearbook One. The staff met up with the Rookie audience in venues like ice cream parlors, record stores, arcades, and theaters, where they did zine/collage-making events, poetry readings, and live performances (Gevinson).

The Rookie Yearbooks were printed yearly roundups of the online magazine content, edited and art-directed by Tavi, along with exclusive interviews and notes from celebrities (Peiser). There were a total of four to cover the magazine’s first four years. In addition to the yearbooks, Rookie also sold t-shirts, stickers, and posters.

END OF AN ERA

But, as I implied at the beginning, this website described by Healy as a “glistening, empowered world of girlhood” did not last. So, what happened?

The simplest answer is social media. But, truthfully, the newspaper industry has been unstable long before then. As Tavi pointed out in her final Editor’s Letter for Rookie, between January 2001 and September 2016, half of all newspaper jobs were cut from the industry (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). It’s also worth remembering that from 2015 to 2018, publications were laying off writers left and right in order to “pivot to video” content, mostly so they could cater to Facebook’s algorithms (Weissman).

According to that same letter, Rookie started running into financial issues as early as 2016, as social media engagement began to make up the bulk of the magazine’s online engagement as opposed to, say, people actually clicking on article links or leaving comments (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). While this technically be a good thing for, say, a zine that was firmly embedded within the social media with no central website, this was bad for Rookie because it rendered their ad-based revenue ineffective (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”).

Tavi had no desire to ask her young readers to subscribe or donate to the site (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). She doesn’t explicitly explain why this was not an option, but my best guess is that she wanted the site to remain accessible to those young people who might not have had the money for a potential subscription or donation.

Tavi had previously been advised to work out some sort of marketing and engagement strategy before things took the turn that they did, but she said she never really listened because…well, she was a teenager (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). Who can blame her.

Anyways, in fall 2017, the Rookie team began searching for investors and/or partnerships they could do to keep the magazine running and strategize to figure out how to expand Rookie’s content offerings (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). However, most potential business partners wanted Tavi to promote herself as the brand’s face to get Rookie back on its feet before passing it off to a new, fresh figurehead that could lead the magazine into the next era (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018;” “Instagram''). By this time, Tavi was wanting to grow beyond Rookie magazine and pursue other ventures like acting, so she was on board with this concept (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018;” “Instagram'').

This didn’t pan out too well. Tavi did more sponsored social media content in order to market herself as an “it girl,” but even though these sponsorships let her avoid taking an income from struggling Rookie, she didn’t really enjoy the “hustle” of doing this, and neither did Rookie’s more progressive-minded audience, who knew when consumerism was being thrown in their faces (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018;” “Instagram”). This particularly came to a head when Tavi was criticized for contributing to gentrification while living in a sponsored luxury apartment in Brooklyn (Gevinson, “Instagram”). She was getting criticized for her personal finances as well since she was so present within the media, but Tavi wrote in Cut magazine that this was largely rooted in a misunderstand of how the media industry works, and that she was never really earning enough to live from such media appearances or photoshoots (Gevinson, “Instagram”). So the plan of Tavi promoting herself as a public figure in order to re-popularize the Rookie website fell apart.

Again, most media companies were already not doing well, so absorbing Rookie without such personality content from Tavi to help it up again was out of the question (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). Tavi explains it all very clearly, again, in the final Editor’s Letter:

“I have spent the fall learning what it would mean to sell Rookie to a new owner who could fund it, build it, or hire more people. I have learned that I can’t take on the responsibility that would come with remaining as its editor, or even transitioning it to a point where I could leave completely.

“…most media companies are also struggling. They can’t afford to buy other publications that are struggling, and/or they are understandably not interested in spending the money to get Rookie to sustainable profitability without the founder/editor/owner since day one—in other words, me. I can’t make that commitment, and at this moment, Rookie can’t exist without it” (Gevinson, “Editor's Letter 2018”).

Thus, on December 1, 2018, Rookie magazine officially ceased operations (Wilson), joining or preceding other sites by women such as the Hairpin, the Awl, the Toast, and Lenny Letter (Blum).

After Rookie folded, the staff at Man Repeller got together to discuss the changing nature of online media. Haley Nahman stated that:

“The part that makes me sad is understanding/learning that content that drives the most traffic (i.e., what keeps media brands in business) is not necessarily the highest quality, and that has become increasingly true as publications that put out good work flail, and those that put out, say, celebrity gossip or SEO-clickbait thrive” (Team Repeller).

Tavi’s goal from the Sassy- and riot grrrl-inspired beginnings of Rookie was always to make great content rather than simple filler articles (Knight). Ultimately, the internet took websites such as these for granted, opting instead to bury them under forgettable filler and clickbait content—something that has clearly continued into the current era. And, though there will always be people searching for good content online, sometimes that minority is not enough to sustain such a time-consuming publication like Rookie and many others.

Fortunately, Rookie remains up as an archival site. So at least we’ll always have the memories.

IMPACT

All in all, Rookie gave young people not only the confidence to share their ideas and express themselves through writing, photography, and DIYs, but also gave them the early experience to pursue such creative ventures at a professional level.

One of the most impressive things about Rookie is the number of names I recognized during my research from today and from my days as an impressionable young teenager on Tumblr. One such name is that of photographer Petra Collins, who was one of the original staff members for Rookie and participated in the Rookie Road Trip that first year in (Kane). Petra published a lot of photography on Rookie that then made the rounds on sites like Tumblr and Pinterest and formed the basis for a good many moodboards of the mid-2010s. She has since moved on to doing photography direction for fashion brands, as well as music videos for artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, Cardi B, and 2021 teen queen Olivia Rodrigo. Other Rookie alumni include NPR Music editor Hazel Cills, another founding Rookie Road Tripper, and Ashley Reese, who once wrote for Jezebel and Netflix’s Tudum, who you’ve probably seen on Twitter. There was also a lot of cross-pollination between Rookie and the Art Hoe movement’s founders and curators. While I don’t believe Ione Gamble ever wrote for Rookie, she was present at meetups for Rookie in London and cites Rookie as the influence for her zine Polyester, as well as Gal-Dem, and One of My Kind (OOMK) (Gamble).

Seeing the sheer number of people who either wrote for or read Rookie during their formative years is honestly amazing. And when you look at Tumblr or Pinterest’s mid-2010 years, it’s obvious that a lot of the “alternative teen girl aesthetic” that Tumblr came to be known for does sort of owe itself to Rookie as well, since so many girls on that site also happened to read Rookie and share images from Rookie to Tumblr or Pinterest. These images ended up on moodboards and continue to inspire online visual content to this day in one way or another. So when former Rookie staff member Arabelle Sicardi declared in 2021 that “pop culture is Rookie” to Teen Vogue—whose progressive content today likely owes a lot to Rookie as well—she isn’t kidding (Wilson). Without Rookie, media for young people, specifically women, girls, and non-binary people, would be a whole lot less endearing.

SEMI-CONCLUSION

That would’ve been a neat place to end this video, but I am going to get on my soapbox and say that it would be really beneficial if we had some sort of online space for tween and teen girls (and non-binary folks) today. Again, Teen Vogue has filled the younger, progressive void, but that’s not really a site where readers can submit things and be published without a pre-existing resume of some sort.

There’s also traditional social media giants like IG, Twitter, Tiktok, etc., but honestly even though they led to the demise of publishers like Rookie, they aren’t really a good replacement. Though anyone can share their thoughts now, these websites have arguably led to the shrinking of both our attention spans and the internet (Holderness). Also, algorithms are weird and perfectly good content is buried under the noise of search-engine optimization or content that simply isn’t good but very popular (example – subway surfer south park nonsense).

These also frankly aren’t safe spaces for young girls and women. In fact, social media was also linked to the teen girls’ mental decline, thanks to things like cyberbullying and the threat of sexual exploitation (Twenge). This is only going to get worse now that we have this wave of misogynistic backlash online, and teen girls who try to use social media can be at any point met with manosphere podcasters, tradwives, or straight-up violent incels who are typically their own male peers (Ewens). And now we also have the issue of AI-generators and deep fake adult materials; girls who post their faces online are likely going to have their faces stolen at one point or another.

At this point, any type of curated, online space for girls to get away from would be beneficial, but we’re so used to the convenience of social media now as a culture that it’s uncertain what form that online space will come in if ever. Hopefully, in one way or another, a new Rookie more suited to our times will pop up somewhere.

ACTUAL OUTRO

So that was depressing! But if you liked the non-depressing parts, and would like to be notified for more videos like this, be sure to click the subscribe button below. I also provide updates via the social media links listed below. This is obviously still a newer channel and I’m still kind of testing certain things out, so feel free to leave any feedback you have in the comments. For short-form biographies on women in the arts or other fun facts about culture, follow my TikTok or Instagram. Thanks for watching!

SOURCES

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Blum, Dani. “Rookie Mag and the Shrinking Spaces to Grow Up Online.” Forbes, 5 Dec. 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/daniblum/2018/12/05/rookie-mag-and-the-shrinking-spaces-to-grow-up-online/?sh=29e11c636a66.

Ewens, Hannah. “Young, Male and Anti-Feminist––the Gen-Z Boys Who Hate Women.” Vice, 28 May 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyv7by/anti-feminist-gen-z-boys-who-hate-women.

Feliciano, Stevie. “The Riot Grrrl Movement.” New York Public Library Blog, 19 June 2013, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/06/19/riot-grrrl-movement.

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Kane, Laura. “Tavi Gevinson: Teenage ‘Rookie’ Still Figuring It Out.” The Star, 24 Oct. 2012, https://www.thestar.com/life/2012/10/24/tavi_gevinson_teenage_rookie_still_figuring_it_out.html.

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Weissman, Cale G. “Here’s an Abridged Timeline of Digital Media’s Pivot to Video.” Fast Company, 21 Feb. 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com/40534037/heres-an-abridged-timeline-of-digital-medias-pivot-to-video.

Widdicombe, Lizzie. “Tavi Says.” New Yorker, 13 Sep. 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/tavi-says.

Wilson, Sophie. “The Legacy of Rookie Mag, Ten Years Later.” Teen Vogue, 7 Oct. 2021, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-legacy-of-rookie-mag-ten-years-later.

#rookie mag #rookie magazine #Youtube

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mybeingthere · 2 years

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Born to a family of sharecroppers in Plainview, Ga., after serving in the Korean War, Benny Andrews (1930 - 2006) graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and headed for New York where he practiced his craft on the Lower East Side. According to the gallery, Andrews soon developed a “‘rough collage’ technique that became a hallmark of his style.”A

ndrews considered himself a “people’s painter” and throughout his career which included many exhibits and accolades, he dedicated himself to issues close to his heart and field.

He helped promising students from underserved communities get a college education, started what would become a nationwide prison art program and worked on an art project with children affected by Hurricane Katrina. Throughout his career he also advocated for black artists and their work, focusing on improving their representation in museums and establishing a foundation to help emerging artists gain exposure and encourage artists to donate their works to black college museums.

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xtruss · 2 months

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How One Black Doctor Brought the Pap to the People! Helen Dickens Was a Crusader Whose Cancer Van Saved Hundreds of Lives

— March 7, 2024 | Kirstin Butler

A Collage Featuring Dr. Helen Octavia Dickens, Hospital Beds, a Microscope, Cancer Cells, and a Van with the Words "American Cancer Society" on the side. Art by Colin Mahoney. Source images from the National Library of Medicine, National Museum of Health and Medicine, Wikimedia.

In 1926, 17-year-old Helen Dickens would sit in the front row of her pre med courses at Crane Junior College in Chicago. Dickens was a dedicated student, but her seating choice in a majority-white academic environment was strategic. “If other students wanted a good seat they had to sit beside me,” she recalled in an interview years later. “This way I didn’t have to look at them or the gestures made that were directed against me.” Dickens went on to become the one Black woman in her graduating class at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, where she met further bigotry with quiet determination. “Her frame of mind was, ‘I'll work through it,’” her daughter Jayne Henderson Brown, also a doctor, told American Experience. “Which she did. It didn't stop her.”

As Dr. Dickens was wrapping up her two-year obstetrics residency, she encountered the next hurdle to her childhood dream of practicing medicine: As a Black woman, white hospitals that employed female doctors didn’t want her, and hospitals serving the Black community hired only men. She was unsure where to go next until, one day, she read a notice on a bulletin board that changed the course of her professional life. It was a letter from Dr. Virginia Alexander, another young Black female doctor, looking for women to join her practice. Alexander ran the Aspiranto Health Home as an alternative birthing center out of her three-story row house in Philadelphia, using her living room as the waiting room and her dining room for treatment. Expectant mothers—some of whom were Black and impoverished, and without other access to care—came to Alexander’s home and received unusually long postpartum care and access to birth control.

Aspiranto was “community service in private practice,” Alexander wrote to Dickens, a “socialized practice of medicine.” Dickens went to Philly, and one year after her arrival took over the home altogether at age 27. The principles behind Aspiranto would guide the way she practiced medicine for the rest of her career. “Alexander helped Dickens to formulate a consciousness around how healthcare could be used as a site of activism,” said Dr. Amina Shakir, who wrote her dissertation about Dickens.

In many ways, Dickens’s background had already primed her to be community-conscious. Her father, Charles, had been born into slavery before escaping and teaching himself to read; he passed when Helen was only eight. “I know when he died,” Dickens later told an interviewer, “he had mortgaged our house to help build a Black meeting hall.” Her father’s death resulted from an infection after a tooth extraction—antibiotics didn’t yet exist—and yet when Dickens was 12, she talked to the family dentist about the possibility of going into medicine. Her father had wanted her to be a nurse, “[b]ut somewhere along the way,” she said, “I decided that if I was going to be a nurse, I might as well become a doctor.”

Dr. Helen Octavia Dickens at her desk. Image courtesy Jayne Henderson Brown.

Over the next seven years of her directorship of Aspiranto, she got the community interaction that she’d always wanted. “It was very exciting,” Dickens remembered of her time leading the birthing center. “You were going into the homes. You were seeing all these people. You were taking responsibility for care of people.” And as one of the first Black female doctors in the city, Dickens saw firsthand the inequity of the healthcare system and the extent to which medicine often marginalized Black women. She dedicated the rest of her life to bringing the best and newest models of care to her own community.

That dedication, during the next chapter of her career, involved getting as many Black women as possible to take a brand new medical test: the pap smear. The test’s namesake was Dr. George Papanicolaou, a Greek immigrant physician who with his wife and lab technician Mary worked for decades to document its efficacy in detecting cervical cancer, then the highest-killing cancer for women. Before the pap smear, cervical cancer was detected by biopsy, which often meant it was too late to treat the disease. “By the time you have symptoms, there's already a mass,” Dr. Henderson Brown explains. “It's already metastasized—liver, lung—and it kills. So the earlier it is detected, the easier it is to prevent the spread.” Dickens, who by the early 1950s had become the first African American board-certified OB/GYN in Philadelphia, proselytized the pap smear’s potential to save her patients’ lives.

Dr. George Papanicolaou Pioneered the Lifesaving Cervical Cancer Screening that now Bears his Name.

First, though, she had to get beyond their historically well-earned distrust of gynecological treatment. The legacy of experimentation and forced sterilization of Black women made them wary of receiving care. “A lot of women are reluctant to get medical checkups that include pelvic exams,” she told the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin—which meant Dickens had to bring the test to them. She did so through clinics and workshops at Black churches; in later years, Dickens even provided free pap tests out of a mobile unit, parking an American Cancer Society van in church parking lots. Dickens also got the National Institutes of Health to fund a program to train other doctors to perform pap tests. “But she doesn't just stop there,” Shakir adds. “She also uses her work to provide statistics on Black women patients for the first time…She's really a forerunner. We take this for granted today because of the ways in which we use patient data.”

Dickens continued her crusade of improving Black women’s medical access in a variety of ways. After joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine in 1965, she pioneered a program for pregnant teens. And as the university’s dean for minority affairs, Dickens recruited other potential doctors from underserved communities, as she herself had once been.

All of this work she did matter-of-factly. It was, says Dr. Shakir, “her unrelenting way of making sure that the dignity and humanity of Black women was respected.” Or as her daughter notes, “I meet people all the time who say, ‘your mother delivered me’ or, ‘we really loved your mother.’ So I think her legacy is the gift she gave of healthcare to every woman who came within 10 feet of her.”

#American 🇺🇸 Experience #The Cancer Detectives #Article #Dr. Helen Octavia Dickens #Helen Dickens | The Crusader | Cancer Van | Against Cancer #Kirstin Butler #Dr. George Papanicolaou #Pioneered | Lifesaving Cervical Cancer Screening

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miafreemandesignpractiseone · 2 months

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Artist Research - Multimedia

SWOON

(n.d.). SWOON. Retrieved March 19, 2024, from https://swoonstudio.org

Swoon is a street artist who uses "intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects" to explore human complexity. Her installations use a range of materials, even combining them with wood and scrap metals to create large scenes. The texture and brightness of her work is beautiful and it's so detailed. You can really feel the emotion present because of the detail she puts into her portraits (they feel so real and convey so much personality and emotion) and into the overall scene.

The style of the portraits is really cool. I love the detailed colour work and how it all comes together to show the form and depth of each character. Her style is still messy, using unrefined strokes, which makes it feel so personal.

Her works are almost like large 3D collages. It feels like she's creating her own worlds that you can walk through and experience by layering large illustrations. It shows me how far you can push the mediam of collage. I don't have to be restricted to paper and small formats. I can create installations that would give me much more room to add detail and create a whole experience for the viewer.

Jan Švankmajer

Švankmajer is a Czech filmmaker using stop motion and claymation techniques to mix mediums through film. 'Lunch' is probably one of the best examples I found of this technique. The concepts of his films are very 'quirky' and strange, to me they feel very uncanny. Lunch is mostly a photographic stop motion but mixed in with some scenes in clay to distort and manipulate the characters in ways that aren't possible in real life. How could I translate Švankmajer's technique of mixing photographic with surrealist elements to manipulate and distort an image? How can combining these two things create something that communicates the perspectives of disability?

youtube

Marian Bantjes

Portfolio archives. (n.d.). Marian Bantjes. Retrieved March 19, 2024, from https://bantjes.com/work/category/portfolio/

Bantjes is a designer who plays a lot with mixed media and tries to incorporate different materials into her work. In this project (below), Bantjes uses dirt she's collected over a number of years in different locations around the world to create a composition that represents 'coexistence'. It's really inspiring to see how far the boundaries of materiality can be pushed, that something as simple as dirt can be collected and rearranged to make art.

Bantjes also plays with lighting and photography to create ways to view her projects. 'MOO Cards' were designed to be written on one side, like business cards, but have a representation of the artist on the other. Bantjes's are bright, layered cards that can create different feelings in different lights. How could I play with this idea in my own work? How could lighting impact the mood and atmosphere of my project? How can colour do this too?

William Utermohlen

William Utermohlen : A persistence of memory - Loyola University Museum of art, Chicago - Chris Boïcos fine arts. (2016). Chris Boïcos Fine Arts. Retrieved March 19, 2024, from https://boicosfinearts.com/exhibitions/william-utermohlen-a-persistence.html

Utermohlen was an artist who suffered from Alzheimer's in his later years. He used his work to document his suffering and the gradual decay of his mind. Through his self-portraits you can clearly see how Alzheimer's impacted Utermohlen's perception of himself and his appearance. His portraits slowly become more misshapen and key features of the face disappear. The portraits carry through Utermohlen's anger and terror of not being able to remember himself and portray himself. The further into Alzheimer's Utermohlen goes, the more unrecognisable his portraits become, "they portray a man doomed yet fighting to preserve his identity".

Oded Ezer

Ezer, O. (2023, March 9). Middle E. Oded Ezer. Retrieved March 19, 2024, from https://www.odedezer.com/works/middle-e

Ezer is a type and conceptual designer. His project, Middle E., represents his identity as someone from the Middle East and showcases some of his collage/print based work. I chose to focus on this work because it is more closely related to my practise of collage and he uses this mediam to explore personal and political ideas, similar to what I intend to do throughout my thesis.

"A series of screen-printed works of the letter ‘E’ that has absorbed the spirit of a beaten and murderous Middle East"

Ezer uses collage and prints to capture the soul of the Middle East in it's now "battered" and "bloody" state due to the conflicts that have taken place there. He started with the letter in an intact form and then ripping and damaging it. Then taking the form and silk printing it to add to that blooded feel. Even just the fragments of a letter can portray so much feeling. You can feel Ezer's anger at the state of the Middle East and the emotions of the people living/connected to the Middle East. How could I use simple forms like Ezer to convey such strong emotions? How could materiality and printing techniques create certain feelings in my work?

#Week four #artist research

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tigerstrikesasteroidnetwork · 5 months

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CHI / Kristin Anahit Cass: Traversing Temporalities

Kristin Anahit Cass: Traversing Temporalities January 6, 2024 to February 17, 2024 Opening Reception: January 6, 2024 1pm to 4pm

Coffee Divination Workshop Armenian Coffee Reading: a sweet treat and your future in a cup. Saturday, February 3, 2024, 1pm to 4pm

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present Traversing Temporalities, a solo exhibition of work by Kristin Anahit Cass. The show explores ideas of SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) futurism through a body of work including photography, video, sculpture, and installation. For viewers, her work offers meditations on time, memory, and futurity. The altar offers an opportunity for visitors to express their own wishes for a better future in communion with the hopes of the subjects portrayed in Cass’s portraits, while experiencing the multiple temporalities of the divination ritual portrayed in the video. The practices of divination, use of amulets, and women’s hand works that are common across many cultures as spiritual practices offer visitors a portal through which to access their own ancestral cultural practices.

Cass began the project in 2012 in contemplation of the 2015 centennial remembrance of the Armenian Genocide. As a descendant of genocide survivors, her family faced the conflicts of living in diaspora and wondering what their lives would have been if indigenous Armenian and other minority populations had not been subjected to genocide and exile. Drawing on her experience as a queer, mixed-ethnicity, diasporan American, Cass’s work occupies multiple temporalities, disorienting time and space as the subjects take control of their own narratives, It embodies past, present, and future at once, much as SWANA ancestral divination practices harness a nonlinear understanding of time, and simultaneous occupation of spaces.

The work in this exhibition uses historical motifs, objects, rituals and places to anchor visions of the future in SWANA ancestral cultures. The portraits featured are complex digital collages of the people, places, and objects that are part of both a shared culture and diversity. Her engagement with her subjects to create a shared vision shows that through art we create images that order our world, both reflecting and constructing our reality. So, through images we may also begin to imagine and construct different futures for ourselves.

Artist Biography:

Kristin Anahit Cass is an artist working in photography, video, writing, sculpture and other media. Cass’s work imagines the future, touches the past, and envisions a better world. As Tamar Boyadjian noted in Hyperallergic, Cass’s work “recognizes the lived experience of trauma, yet owns the ability of humans to individually and collectively reframe that experience in their hearts to make way for reparations.” In addition to her arts education, Cass has worked with women and minority owned businesses, artists, and nonprofits in her career as a lawyer. She is one of the founders of the LGBTQ platform Entanik (Family) where she is active in supporting creatives in the global community.

Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including Reparations of the Heart at the Stamelos Gallery Center at the University of Michigan, Witness: The Artist's Response at Elephant Room Gallery in Chicago, Chicago Neighborhoods at the Hairpin Gallery in Chicago and SLAYSIAN 2.0 at Co-Prosperity in Chicago. Her Borderlands Under Fire project was a finalist for the 2018 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. Cass is a graduate of the University of Chicago.

Curator Bio:

Cydney M. Lewis, is a Chicago-based multimedia artist with a multi-disciplinary and distinguished background.Her work delves into material manipulation, drawing her viewers into a realm of visual archaeology. Lewis intricately weaves the natural, spiritual, and scientific, observing nature's resilience and our potential for harmonious existence. Her art is held in private collections around the world, and has been exhibited widely, including most recently in the Satellite Art Fair at Art Basel in Miami, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, National Museum in Berlin and the Hyde Park Art Center. Lewis' foundation lies in architecture, holding a degree from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and studied at L'ecole D'architecture des Versailles, France. Recognitions encompass residencies at Chicago Public Schools, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Lyseloth Musikerwohnhaus in Basel, Switzerland.

You can find Kristin's work at kristincass.com, on Instagram at KristinAnahitCassProjects, on Facebook at Kristin Cass Photography, and on LinkedIn at Anahit Cass

#tigerstrikesasteroid #tiger strikes asteroid #traversingtemporalities

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sarah-rieser · 11 months

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I’ve been included in an AnySquared Projects exhibition at Agitator Gallery from June 24th through July 10th, with an opening reception tonight from 6 to 10pm - check me out!

https://anysquared.org/New/?p=5993

https://www.facebook.com/events/211215224607836?active_tab=about

AnySquared | Press Release

This exhibition is the launch of AnySquared’s Home Not Home Series, which will run through 2024 at various venues in Chicago. The Home Not Home exhibition investigates various themes, including belonging/not belonging, freedom/captivity, safety/danger, comfort/discomfort, inclusive/exclusive, building/destroying, and place/displacement. Home Not Home is an examination of the complicated dichotomies of the idea of home and aims to demonstrate that while the concept of home is universal, the experience is very personal.

AnySquared is a collaborative network and a platform for artists. Propelled by a profound sense of cooperation with artists, neighbors, and the larger community, our mission is to support projects that promote inclusive participation in arts activities. Our foundation is the belief that we can accomplish anything if we work together.

Thank you to Agitator Artist Collective for making space and collaborating for this installment of the series. For more information, please visit anysquared.org and agitatorgallery.com

Home Not Home | Schedule

• Saturday June 24th 6pm-10pm: Opening • Sunday June 25th 3pm-7pm: Gallery Hours • Friday June 30th 3pm-8pm: Gallery Hours and Friday Art Session • Saturday July 1st 5:30pm-9pm: Spoken Word & Music Event featuring Mars A. Caulton, Kao Ra Zen, Angelique Ambers, Tanae B., and Sunshine • Sunday July 2nd 3pm-4:30pm: Collage Oracle Deck Workshop (Gallery Hours 3pm-7pm) • Thursday July 6th 7:30pm-8pm: Performance by Sayed Misa Sourour (Gallery Hours 7pm-9pm) • Friday July 7th 3pm-8pm: Gallery Hours and Friday Art Session • Friday July 7th 6pm-8pm: Mindfulness & Art Therapy Workshop • Sunday July 9th 6pm-9pm: Performance/Music Event

#Home Not Home

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sinceileftyoublog · 2 years

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Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer Interview: Press Record

BY JORDAN MAINZER

These days, Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer make topographical music.

The modular synthesizer artist and violist first met in Chicago, playing a performance of Terry Riley’s In C at the venue Constellation, with an ensemble put together by ambient trio Bitchin Bajas. Up until that point, Chiu primarily worked as a graphic designer, Honer as an instructor and part of a quartet. But their first collaboration proved rewarding enough for the two to continue. They moved to Los Angeles in 2014 and became more heavily involved in their various studies: Chiu as a visual artist, sound designer, and community organizer, Honer as a prominent session musician. And both as teachers.

It wasn’t until 2017 that their most fruitful musical collaboration was born. Chiu and Honer traveled to the Åland Islands, an archipelago in the Baltic Sea, to help mother/daughter duo Jannika/Sage Reed barn raise an inn named Hotel Svala in Kumlinge. They hoped to generate a space for residencies, fostering a creative community like they’d done in the cities they’d lived in. Throughout their nonstop days of labor--nonstop because during the summer, the sun never set--they found themselves recording various natural and manmade aspects of the island, for no reason other than to document surroundings that they may not ever get to go back to. But fast-forward to 2019, and Chiu and Honer did return: They were awarded a grant to return to the Åland Islands to perform a concert at a 14th century medieval church called Kumlinge Kyrka. They recorded the concert and, with a wealth of source material from both trips, decided to collage their recordings together, along with other improvisations on various instruments, to create Recordings from the Åland Islands, released on International Anthem in March.

Independent of its context, the album is a pleasure to listen to, one that allows you to create your own associations with the sounds. Warbling synth harmonics, birdsong, and crunchy noises like a train in the rain pervade opener “In Åland Air” (which features processing from Tortoise’s John McEntire). “On the Other Sea” is reminiscent of Boards of Canada’s penchant for finding eerie atonality in otherwise beatific timbres, with its wind chimes, synths, and horns. “Rocky Passage” creaks along, full of noises like hearing a woodpecker on a hike, unable to spot the bird cascading up and down its tree. The synth arpeggios on “By Foot By Sea” sound, of course, like the up-and-down current of waves. But I find the album even more rewarding when you do know the stories behind the songs, the way the instruments try to emulate nature. Honer’s viola leads my favorite, “Snåcko”, a track named for the island next to Kumlinge, as keys circle in the background, purportedly inspired by the feeling of your eyes slowly adjusting to multi-colored moss in the forest of the island.

Tonight, in an In The Round performance, Chiu and Honer bring the Åland Islands to Thalia Hall as part of a triple (!) International Anthem release show. Along with Daniel Villareal (celebrating Panamá 77) and Anteloper, the duo of Jaimie Branch and Jason Nazary (celebrating Pink Dolphins), Chiu and Honer will start with the base sounds of the tracks from their new album and improvise from there depending on the crowd. In advance of their performance, I spoke with Chiu and Honer over Zoom about their approach in making an album about a place very few people have been, improvising in response to nature, and being a part of International Anthem. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: This album has very personal associations for both of you, both in terms of the source material and its inspirations. When making it, did you at all think about the experience of a listener who hasn’t been to these islands and what they might associate certain sounds with?

Jeremiah Chiu: That’s a great question. When you’re making a record, there’s always a balance, to the point of losing one’s self in it where you question what the purpose of making it is. Is it to capture our own experience? How might that resonate with the listener? I feel a lot of what we did in the process of the music after it had been captured is put ourselves in a position of both artist and listener. We were listening to so much of what we captured there and wanted to make sure we maintained the spirit and literally the sound and essence of those recordings. A lot of it wasn’t captured with the intention of [making a record.] We were traveling and sightseeing and experimenting and just so happened to press record. A lot of that material ended up being used as-is but collaged together. The experience of the listener is something we also paid a lot of attention to. We were trying to do as little manipulation as possible. We weren’t rerecording and overdubbing. We were looking at various things that happened and trying to find a way to bring them forward.

SILY: At the same time, at the end of “Stureby House Piano”, Jeremiah, you say, “Send me that, we’ll just use it.” Do you recall other moments like that where you recorded something and immediately knew it was gonna be on the record?

Marta Sofia Honer: Well, we didn’t immediately know there was going to be a record that first trip or even fully that second trip. It was more in that moment where you hear Jeremiah talking about the Stureby, it was a really special moment and maybe we could use it for something.

JC: A lot of it started to form as we were going more and more around and started to realize a lot of stuff was being collected. So there was a little bit of an idea along the way. We’d recorded enough random material on the trip that we might form it into something later. That recording, I didn’t even know that was being taken, and when I heard it back, I thought, “There’s something really nice that could be used, whether part of a record or its own thing.”

SILY: The songs capture a lot of different aspects of the islands, both naturally and in terms of the mood. How do you go about consciously trying to make sounds peaceful, disorienting, or in between? Does that process more naturally unfold?

MSH: There were a lot of moments where it naturally unfolded because we tried to preserve a lot of those moments of improvisation where we did sit down to play, or those moments of exploring and capturing. The first trip we took during midsummer, the sun never really sets, and the days are suspended eternally. With jet lag, it can be a really surreal, trippy time, so those initial improv moments had a lot of that in it. It projected itself onto the songs.

JC: In recording this stuff, a lot of it comes from improvisations, but a lot of what you hear in the improvisations is us responding to the place. In that process, as an example, we make mention in the liner notes that this record may not be the kind of record we ever make again. What we mean by that is that the pace of the record is slow because the place is slow. We were really responding to that sense of place and our experience of time there where it would feel really strange to do something fast. That’s just not the nature of that place. It does have this in-betweenness that’s very gentle and serene but with an underlying unknown. It doesn’t always resolve. We were really responding to that when we were capturing and playing and sitting in a place having decided to pick up an instrument and press record.

SILY: It reminds me of some other records I’ve heard that collage field recording and instrumentation, where the synthesizer and the viola start to emulate aspects of the natural world to the point the listener’s questioning the difference between “music” and “recording”. Did you experience that question a lot on these islands?

JC: Absolutely. Some of our other favorite records do similar things, so there was a referential precedent we were paying attention to. Some of my favorite recordings are ones where you don’t exactly know what’s going on. Some of it feels straightforward, some of it feels organic, but there are moments where the manipulation of sound and the fidelity of the sound shifts quite a lot. On our recordings, you hear voice memos and field recordings, and there’s a way to edit or combine all of those fidelities into one thing that feels cohesive, even though it might not be the cleanest recording possible.

SILY: Marta, on a track like “On The Other Sea”, your viola has almost horn-like qualities. If I had gone into it, without context, I would have thought it was a horn. On “Archipelago”, your viola goes hand in hand with the flute. How do you get your instrument to take on so many tones?

MSH: I think there is horn on [“On The Other Sea”].

JC: Often times, you’re playing [multiple instruments]. You should talk about how you granular synthesize and MIDI your lines.

MSH: Okay, sure. I don’t think it happens on [“On The Other Sea”], though. But in terms of tone, you brought up a great point of two very different ways, where on “On The Other Sea”, I’m going for a more melodic, bell-like, or brassy tone you could imagine projecting over the ocean. We have those field recordings of the water on that track. “Archipelago”, I was doing more layering with variation and texture, so that’s created where I’m moving the contact point of my bow. If I’m moving it closer to my bridge, that’s going to start to [become] higher based on whatever tone or pitch I’m playing. If I move closer to the fingerboard, that’s more of an airy texture. I was trying to create more topographical sound. As Jeremiah mentioned, there are tracks where we took the existing melodies I recorded and we took granular synthesis to chop up the phrase and get some different melody lines coming out, which is what I also did with the flutes on “Archipelago”. On “Snåcko”, we took my melody line and converted it to MIDI.

JC: We had it triggered.

MSH: Those are moments where you hear the viola tone, and it blends into a more synthesizer tone.

SILY: “Archipelago” was recorded in an empty pool. Did you come across the pool and immediately think, “I have to make something in here?”

MSH: There’s a pool house in the back of Hotel Svala where we were staying with our friends and helping work. Jeremiah spent a lot of time in that pool house initially because there was a sauna. I think I spent an entire day staining the new sauna. We were doing some manual labor outside the perfect empty pool. Once we finished our tasks--and the day is expansive--we decided to go at the bottom of the pool and see what that sounded like.

SILY: Does “Kumlinge Kyrka”, named after the venue in which it was recorded, have most of the concert material?

JC: I think that piece is a direct pull from the concert, while more of the other pieces pull bits.

SILY: How are you performing this material live?

JC: [laughs] Great question.

MSH: Well, we have been. When the record was coming out, we had to think about how we were gonna pull it off. The performance is presenting some of the material and sounds and melodic lines people are familiar with from the record, but also improvising and expanding off of those ideas. Our setup is me on viola and percussive instruments like the chimes and bells you hear opening a lot of the tracks. I also have a little sampler I’m using to trigger the field recordings and lines I’ve prepared that I can’t do acoustically.

JC: I just have my synthesizer rig. It’s not too different from what we brought [to the Åland Islands] to do a performance. Similar instrumentation, but the nature of this record is so collaged and ephemeral and has its own distinct sound. We’re not attempting to recreate it exactly by any means, more [use it] as jumping off points. We might start at the motifs or melodic structure of the sound, but then we take it where we feel like going depending on the audience, the venue, the night. We’ve done a couple performances, and some become more melodic and serene, and sometimes we push it, and it becomes more rhythmic and percussive. It’s been allowing us to tread new territory in how we play together, in hopes that might form the beginnings of a new record in the future.

SILY: Does playing a venue the size of Thalia Hall change your approach?

MSH: I don’t think so. We always let the vibe of the crowd affect our improvisational approach. If the crowd is more active and excited, we’ll push it and have there be a bit more energy and percussion. If it’s something where everyone seems to be a little more mellow and seems to be listening attentively, we might keep it on the gentler side.

SILY: What does being part of the International Anthem community mean to you?

JC: Oh man, they’re the best. [laughs] So much of it is their approach. A lot of the way we were connected through is that Marta was starting to collaborate with [their artists], like on Daniel’s record. As we were starting to form this one, [label co-founder] Scottie [McNiece] had heard parts of it and expressed some interest. We were so fortunate to have his support and guidance of the whole team, [recording engineer and warehouse manager] Dave Vettraino, [co-founder and recording engineer] David Allen, [marketing, communications, & events person] Alejandro Ayala. It’s interesting for us because that label, on the outside, wasn’t a self-described jazz label, but of course they’re putting out so much amazing material in that realm. For us, it’s a Chicago label, tethered to a community out of that city. We’ve spent a lot of time working in that city and felt that connection working with so many artists on the roster.

SILY: What’s next for the two of you?

MSH: We’re definitely starting to explore some sounds and territory that could be interesting in terms of writing more material for us. Jeremiah is finishing up a solo record as well.

JC: There are many different projects in various states needing to get finalized. Marta’s a session musician and performer always in the studio working on other people’s projects. There’s an ongoing flood of music we’re working on. We’re hoping to expand on the momentum and incredibly positive feedback we’ve received on this record. We’re just so fortunate to have the opportunity to do anything like this.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading you’ve been into?

JC: Celia Hollander’s record last summer was incredible. We’ve been collaborating a lot with each other. Same with Sam Prekop, Patrick Shiroishi, Dustin Wong, Ben Babbitt, Walt McClements last records. A couple of those last records that came out on American Dreams are so beautiful and wonderful. We had the great fortune of playing a couple shows with Alabaster [dePlume], and seeing how that live stuff comes together is mind-blowing and incredible, how different it can be every time, but also how powerful it can be. Lea Bertucci has some great releases too. And you have to listen to the new Daniel [Villareal] record on International Anthem. Irreversible Entanglements, that record’s incredible, too.

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analogartand · 2 years

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Exploring The Best Collage Art

Collage is a technique of art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. A collage may sometimes include newspaper clippings, ribbons, paint, bits of colored or handmade papers, portions of other artwork or texts, photographs, and other found objects, glued to a piece of paper or canvas. Several Collage Art Chicago designs explore one or more of the abovementioned features.

Collage as a form of Art allows the artist to fully express their skill and talent using whatever is available in the environment and nature to create new art forms and work. Collage is also a form of Art that uses pieces from pre-existing things such as magazines, newspapers, and other printed materials; it also combines these materials with new materials to create a new original work of Art. Collage Art San Francisco will give you the best feeling of appreciating their collage art.

Best Collage Arts

The best collage art is created when the artist can use multiple mediums and different materials. Most importantly, the artist's vision comes through in work, as seen in the Collage works available at Analogue Art and Design. Several collage artworks have been created, sold in auction sales, and have made a great impact. Some of the best Collage Arts you can find n display include:

We were wildlife

Shapeshift

Dust falls to the earth

Amusing and incongruent

Peony in the snow

Song of yearning

We Were Wildlife

This Collage shows the combination of humans, the wildlife, and forest life around humans. This collage piece is made with a combination of these features, making it an ideal combination of a human with a bird's head.

Shapeshift

This piece is a combination of fabrics of different colors and feather materials, which the artist brings together to make a transformable artwork that depicts the ability of the work to shift in shape, which eases rework by the artist.

Dust Falls to the Earth

This depicts the mixture of materials giving the impression of dust falling on earth as the name implies.

Amusing and Incongruent

This piece gives the feeling of amusement and yet looks incongruent from its look.

Peony in the Snow

This piece expresses survival in a torrid environment, hence the depiction of a Peony flower growing in the snow.

Song of yearning

This piece is the look of a lady yearning for something yet unable to find what she is yearning for.

Conclusion

Collage art is a medium for experimentation and development of artistic skills and a creative way to communicate ideas. The artist can use it to develop their own identity or style and explore new areas of visual expression. Artists use Collage in a variety of ways, from creating entire works with nothing but found materials to adding a few pieces to an existing painting or drawing. Collages are also used in many offices and colleges as part of the education curriculum.

#Collage Art Chicago #Collage Art San Francisco

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thestylistapproach · 2 years

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PIDP 3240 Assignment 1 Entry 2 Fair Dealings in the Classroom

Objective

In Canada fair dealing is a provision under the Copyright Act that provides that “it is not an infringement of copyright to deal with a work for the purposes of research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, education, satire, and parody, provided the dealing is “fair””. (Noel & Snel, 2016.) Although fair dealing has been present in the Copyright Act since 1921 it “existed as an unused vestigial presence in the Copyright Act” and “in the absence of fair dealing in practice, the void was largely filled by copyright collective societies”. (Swartz, Ludbrook, Spong & Slaght, 2019.) In the early twenty-first century, copyright cases began to surface that tested the boundaries of fair dealings and “Canadian courts began to shift toward stronger user rights.” (Swartz, Ludbrook, Spong & Slaght, 2019.) Fast forward to 2011 and “the educational sector, including public junior, intermediate and senior schools, community colleges and universities, banded together and created a standard approach for using the fair dealing exception to communicate and reproduce, in paper or electronic form, short excerpts from a copyright-protected work to students for educational purposes”. (Swartz, Ludbrook, Spong & Slaght, 2019.) As there is still much uncertainty on how the copyright laws will change in the future, for now fair dealings is how most educators in Canada deliver information to learners respecting copyright laws and the creators’ dependant on that law. Upon research of copyright and fair dealing laws I find myself wondering how I can teach future stylists to protect their work and understand their rights as creators of their craft.

Reflective

When we take a look at fair dealing within education, not much information is given on how it concerns the hairstyling classroom outside of theory textbook use and like materials. In the hair classroom, each student receives original hard copies of theory text and workbooks from the publishers. Instructors seldomly stray from those materials unless they are using public or commercial material such as YouTube videos that display cutting or coloring techniques, or content that is provided directly from product manufacturers such as guides and instructions on either the products’ intended use or technique guidelines. Having worked in the hair industry as an active stylist I can attest to the concern among hairstylists in the protection of their work. In a blog by Daniel D. Stuhlman, catalogue librarian for Malcom X Collage in Chicago, IL states that “even if protection was claimed for the hairstyle, it would be hard to know exactly where the line is drawn for derivative, imitative, or parody styles which are allowed. Hair moves constantly and has no fixed form. One would have a hard time figuring out what is the fixed form. Would one hair in another place or a slightly different hair color qualify as a new work? There is no way to measure if the hair infringes on the first person’s claim.” (2011) I agree that the idea of copyright law applying to hairstyles is far-fetched however I can also see the need for protection on creators’ images of hair works they have done, given that the hair industry has laid strong roots in imagery within technology. Specifically, a huge online presence in social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Interpretive

The rules and guidelines concerning modern technology, images and other forms of media have been unclear. In a recent statutory review of the Copyright Act a recommendation set forth about technological protection states “that the Government of Canada examine measures to modernize copyright policy with digital technologies affecting Canadians and Canadian institutions, including the relevance of technological protection measures within copyright law”. (Ruimy, 2019) In today’s climate, it is apparent that change may be on the horizon when it comes to the modern technology shift and copyright laws of the twenty-first century. As there is hopeful sight for change in further defending creators’ works within multiple technology and media platforms like imagery, I think that instructors of the hair classroom, in the interim, need to utilize both fair dealings in their practice but also educate their learners on how to best protect their own creative and original works in our current copyright environment. An online Image protection platform called Pixsy released an informational piece on their website noting that “though it remains practically impossible to completely prevent image theft, there are a number of ways to minimize risk”. (unknown) The article goes on to describe 13 best practices in protecting images focusing on internet presence. These practices include watermarking images, use of copyright notice and digital signatures as well as multiple ways to adjust and format images to better protect against theft.

Decisional

“Since teachers use copyright-protected materials as well as educate the copyright owners and users of tomorrow, they have a unique responsibility to set the right example.” (Noel & Snel, 2016) It is easy to conclude that facilitating a deeper understanding of copyright and fair dealing in the classroom aids not only in the safeguard of existing works but fuels the growth of new. In my research, it is apparent that the laws surrounding copyright are not perfect, especially in a hairstyling world, and may never be. However, as an educator, I can offer my learners the best practices and tools available today to help protect their creative works, with a little less risk in the foreground. Currently, I teach a module within the hair program that encourages students to start off their professional social media platforms on the right foot. Pixsy’s guide to prevent image theft is a useful tool that I will integrate to enhance content and educate my learners about the importance of copyright and fair dealing laws and what that means to them as future stylists.

References

W.Noel & J.Snel, (2016) Copyright Matters. Canadian Teacher’s Federation. Retrieved from: Http://cmec.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/291/Copyright_Matters.pdf

M.Swartz, A.Ludbrook, S.Spong & G.Slaght. (2019) From Fair Dealing to Fair Use: How Universities Have Adapted to the Changing Copyright Landscape in Canada. The Association of College and Research Libraries. Retrieved from: https://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/publications/booksanddigitalresources /digital/9780838946558_OA.pdf#page=374

D. D. Stuhlman, (2011). Can Hairstyles be Protected with Copyright?: A librarian's comments on books, copyright, management, librarianship, and libraries that don't get the full article treatment. Kol Safran Blogspot. Retrieved from: https://kol-safran.blogspot.com/2011/01/can-hairstyle-be- protected-with.html

D.Ruimy, (2019). Statutory Review of the Copyright Act. Published under the authority of the Speaker of the House of Commons. Retrieved from: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/INDU/Reports/RP10537003/indurp16/i ndurp16-e.pdf

Pixsy, (unknown). The Ultimate Image Protection Guide: 13 Tips to Prevent Image Theft. Online Image Protection Platform. Retrieved From: https://www.pixsy.com/academy/image-owner/protect- images-online/

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