A World Unbound: How Cory Feder Untangles Reality Alex Fulmer + Cory Feder

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

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

On top of weekend art classes and attending an arts magnet school, Feder’s love of art, illustration, and animation found its origin in newspaper comics such as “Archie” and “Calvin & Hobbes,” as well as the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” While these cartoons instilled a love for the forms that she still expresses herself within today, a majority of the childhood creativity seen in her current art first grew in her own backyard. She credits her time playing in the outdoors as a child with establishing “a deep comfort

and ritual of playing out my imagination however it needed to be played out. Playing for hours with dirt and talking to plants as a kid was most definitely the most important foundation for my creativity today.” While her work today is imbued with the whimsy of this youthful creativity, Feder additionally employs the mythology of her Korean heritage to create the dreamscapes seen in her art.

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

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

Just as the faces of these figures themselves have appeared in Feder’s imagination since her youth, she charts the artistic contemplation of culture and reality in her work back to a childhood relationship with these mythological entities. Feder says “as a kid, I was far from comfortable in my body, growing up with very few people who looked like me. I think what began as an escape from reality led more to this acknowledgment that the events taking place in my waking life were just as layered and multifaceted as my dream world.” This idea appears in Feder’s work through her creation of a world that not only blurs the demarcation of cultural boundaries but more profoundly constructs a liminal space that balances the real with the mythological. In speaking with Uniqueboard, Feder describes how she perceives the relationship between myth and reality: “I’ve always believed that myth provides ethos for the world at large and in the same sense, I believe that paying attention to what we see in our minds whether it’s through dreams or fantasy is equally valuable. Reality is not just what is there when I

Sometimes I want to untie the entire universe. Untangle every knot of my morning ritual and nighttime routine Inspect every colored thread of my friends, loved ones, teachers Cut open every seam that seals my identity into a pretty shape To undo it all and piece it back together with every particle of magic that settled like dust in the fabric No more settled dust.

Cory Feder

open my eyes, it is layered, tangled and sometimes invisible, and life exists on every plane of it.” By locating the seemingly unreal in a world that’s all too real, Feder’s art demonstrates the power in rewriting the story of one’s life, reclaiming the words nonconsensually inscribed by the hand of another. Thus, agency is found in self-redefinition or even the rejection of a definition whatsoever.

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

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

Feder’s analysis of personal narrative carries an entirely new weight in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: transforming from an individual phenomenon to communal responsibility. In a time when quarantine has reduced the multiple perspectives with which we perceive the world to faces, voices, and words on a screen, our subjective points of view are increasingly vulnerable to manipulation. Each of our personal realities is suddenly malleable, primed by loneliness for distortion. Thus, the tampering effects of pandemic isolation have deemed community all the more imperative. Feder

believes that the pandemic changed the way she views her own personal narrative in that “Before the pandemic, I was most definitely in a more individualistic mindset that now feels so frivolous. Knowing that my work is the channel of how I connect with others, it is most definitely transforming as I learn more about community-based thinking.” On top of affecting the perspective through which she sees the world as a human, this shift towards communal virtue appears prevalently in her point of view as an artist.

One illustration, in particular, depicts Feder’s valuing of this communal spirit. Posted to her Instagram in March 2020 with the caption “All traveling together to our unknown destination,” the drawing shows a rare image of human faith in nature and in one another. A field of yellow and orange wildflowers is cleft in two by a path of people following a prophetic guiding star. Surrounding this small community, fantastical creatures with sharp teeth and forked tongues lurk in the tall grass, but a face in the crowd smiles back to the viewer unafraid. The star is unknown, wavering, but warm. The community finds its strength in numbers, in its shared faith. Just as the pandemic deems nature an enemy in its pathogens and an ally in its remedies, nature provides the security of a steadfast star in exchange for the danger of its earthen predators. Exemplified by the star itself, Feder reveals how time is nature’s perseverant gift to humanity during periods of trauma. The star demonstrates that the future may be uncertain, but it is, nevertheless, inevitable — and community is instrumental in the waiting. When not drawing or illustrating comics, Feder also explores her creative identity through animation, music, and sculpture. Feder says that each of these mediums expresses “different facets of one creative identity. They not only inform each other but allow for rhythm and space to occur in my thinking and research.” As a musician under her Korean name Yesol, Feder released a 6-track EP “Telluric” in 2017. Before the end of 2021, Feder plans to release new music as well as the project’s accompanying visuals. Additionally in the coming year, in collaboration with her friend Annaliza De Leon Evangelista, Feder and Evangelista’s collective Unidentified Butterflies plans to host a remote kite festival. Feder hopes the festival will “start dialogue within the Asian diaspora of decolonizing Asian identity and uplifting indigenous voices around the world.”

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

Alex Fulmer is a student at the University of Southern California currently pursuing a degree in Art History.