Tapestry
I don't like eye contact. Well, that's only somewhat true. I like looking at eyes. But I don’t like it when they look back. These strange, infinite holes – opaque and transparent, forming a connection too intimate too quickly: penetrating with a single hold.
Ash had big eyes, the kind that seemed to be two colors at once. We met after a few email exchanges originating from the Contact hyperlink on her About page. Next to it was the sentence, "Ash Limés Castellana is a printmaker and multimedia artist residing in Philadelphia." Through internet magic, I found myself re-reading that same description outside her studio door, excited to see the artwork I only scrolled through on Google Chrome. This was amateur artist, photographer me, meeting real artist, screenprinter Ash. I wanted to make a good impression and "connect," whatever that meant.
At 5:30pm, she opened the door, "Hello!" A perfunctory handshake. “How are you?” Just-long-enough eye contact followed. In that moment, I realized 30% more photons must reach her retina than mine, and that's not just because I'm Asian. "Welcome to The FWM!" We were on the 7th floor of The Fabric Workshop and Museum, the crossover of an impossibly long hospital hallway and a neat hippie studio. The small gift shop entrance downstairs, solo elevator ride up, and white-walled waiting room outside felt like unworthy facades to this chapel of creation, like the infinity hallway produced when two mirrors are caught staring at one another. This was Ash's chosen home—if I hadn't reached out to her, the unassuming entrance in front would be another one of the hundreds I pass by everyday. A lot like most strangers, I suppose.
"Let me quickly take you around before we close at 6!" Ash's crash course began. To screenprint one must sketch, draw, design, print, mask, mix, ink, squeegee, rinse, then repeat. It felt familiar. Ash read my mind, "This is almost exactly like analog film photography minus the paint portion. You create a negative to expose the final image." At the end of the process, I found 1 foot, 5 feet, even 20 feet long fabric masterpieces inside her infinity hallway. The depth stretched to vanishing points. I thought to myself, Each and every one of these pieces definitely screamed when stuffed onto my LCD screen. In my backpack, my laptop and camera sat still. I was reminded that no matter how clear my retina displays become, perspective is analog.
6pm arrived, and I realized that in Ash's exposition, I learned more about her studio than her. She read my mind, "Do you want to go grab coffee?" I don't like coffee, but I love grabbing it. A while later, we found ourselves in the middle of a quaint coffee shop, the artsy kind with curated negative space with too few chairs. Iced tea in hand, I asked, "Do you want to walk outside instead?" Part of this was practical—our stuffy noses would run less—and part of this was personal—no need for eye contact this way.
We trudged up Walnut Street, the sky above opening itself up to the kind of scene usually found on Google Images. It was one of the first warm winter days of the season, one that made you smell adjectives of sweet and full. Ash's tissue paper roll was now stuffed safely in her backpack, giving us a reprieve to “chat”.
We sped-ran through the usual gamut of topics: she was raised in Miami as a first-generation immigrant from Cuba, worked as both artist and art-educator, and owns a dog with her husband. I reflected reflexively: I was Texas-born but Shanghai-raised, electrical engineer or business student but usually photographer, and no dog unfortunately. The conversation did not feel dissimilar to the tour Ash had given me minutes prior, expositional in nature, necessarily contextual. Small talk, shooting the breeze, just chattin' – these were all ways of the same thing: planned connection. I abandoned this strategy and tried to use the quality of a question determine the quality of the answer. "How did you decide to become an artist? I never really considered that as a career possibility. But whenever I take my camera out, life seems to… notice itself." 7-year-old street dancers interrupted us outside a 7/11, and a small foot almost hit my stomach. When the performance finished, I chuckled—art comes in so many forms. Ash replied, "I sort of fell into screenprinting in college, but I was always interested in art. You're always trying to, I guess, see something." I liked the sound of what she was hinting at—that art is about creating and doing, sure—but also that at its core, art is about noticing, about perceiving. Art is how you see.
We stopped at an intersection. On the ground, I noticed the cracks on the sidewalk, how they zigzagged down cement, creating the shape raindrops make when finding ways down window panes. It took me a second to realize our conversation had paused, and I looked over to see Ash looking down at something too, her green irises outlining halos of past thoughts. This act of noticing, of seeing, of actually looking—something about that felt like art to me.
We arrived at a bench on the Schuylkill River trail. I pointed upwards and said, "That cloud over there looks like a dinosaur too curious for its own good." Ash responded, "Which cloud? What does a dinosaur too curious for its own good even look like?" I answered, "I don't know, kind of like that cloud," pointing again. Our conversation had reached that magical threshold of carrying itself, and we began to talk about, "What marriage looks like," "What a good conversation looks like," "What an older relationship with parents looks like." I wondered why I always used the phrase, "looks like," when describing thoughts. Why not any other sense? What if the question were, "What does your relationship with your parent smell like?" Mine is musky and filled with cedar: a sense of homeliness and comfort, maybe a log burning in the corner. Ash quietly mentioned she hadn't spoken to her father in the large part of a long while. Maybe smells of burnt forests longing for acorns.
The sun soon faded, and we noticed thunderstorms in the distance lighting up clouds from within. It was time to conclude our two-player epic, a game whose goal was to make the opposing stranger less strange. Towards the end, Ash remarked, "It's interesting getting to know you, and this feeling of getting to know someone. Like, I didn't think we had any awkward pauses or anything, and it felt so natural." She avoided my eyes, gazing instead at the approaching electric clouds.
Conversation is so terrifyingly mystical: how human it is to crave communion, and how normal it is to not achieve it. Ash and I were not on a fact guide or even fact-finding. There were no hallway tours I could give to Ash for insight into my mind, and it wasn't until we moved on from exposition that I felt a sense of knowing her, of knowing her eyes, of knowing what things looked like to Ash.
Before we left, that last moment of eye contact we made with one another felt familiar, more comforting. Maybe it was the silence that preceded it, characterizing connection as a delicacy and not a vulnerability. There we were, Ash and me, two artists' eyes peering through each other, two stuffy noses sniffing each other's pasts—two people realizing they had to look out, in order to look in.