ISSUE 3: DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

ISSUE 3: DREAMS & NIGHTMARES

2024

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a dream is alive. a fire, forced to ebb and flow. an unpredictable movie of an alternate reality. a way for the brain to escape within. the brain is present but the body is left behind.

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THE TEAM

Callie Wohlgemuth they/she/he

Karina Wu Fung she/they

we are ech(o)z. we are a group of creatives whose main mission is to uplift and collaborate with the voices of the unseen and unheard. our collective experiences echo through multimedia creation. we hope you join us on our journey.

AzeliA they/them

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ARTIST STATEMENTS Vic Xu (they/them) Instagram: @vixixu HangZhou, China Vic Xu is an artist and researcher, fostering a practice with cornerstones in design, photography, and painting. Drawing from the language of their everyday, their work flows between images, objects, and memory to sit with moments of quiet possibility, when past histories peak through and future visions feel malleable.

Jinghong Chen (she/her) Instagram: @jinghongart Providence, Rhode Island Born and raised in southern China, Jinghong’s works are influenced by Chinese folk traditions. She draws inspiration from memories, nature, and dreams which often leads her to explore her relationship to family, land, and the greater Chinese diaspora. Borrowing religious and traditional Chinese motifs, Jinghong often plays with the juxtaposition of the spiritual and physical distance between ourselves and home, and a feeling of misplacement. The medium of paper allows her to connect with many Chinese ritual practices, blurring the line between reality and imagination.

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Milo Harris (they/them) Instagram: @miloh4rris Oakland, California Milo Harris is a multimedia artist from San Francisco, CA. Milo finds holiness in objects that evoke memory, centering utilitarian craft and worldbuilding in their conceptual practice.

They are fascinated by distortion, fossilization, and metamorphosis.

Annie Teoh (she/her) Instagram: @salebster South Hadley, Massachussetts Annie Teoh is a Chinese Malaysian artist and student. She likes the meditative process of drawing and creating with her hands, recently, her art has been leaning towards abstractive style.

Carmen MC Vigilante (she/they) Instagram: @mc_vigilante Carmen MC Vigilante is an antidisciplinary artistscientist. Spanning installation, digital media, and performance, Carmen’s art practice explores glitches, noise, and compression as fruitful entanglements of the physical and the immaterial.

Contextualizing her relationship with sculpture and sound, Carmen experiences her body as the materialization of a dream. Carmen performs computer music and harsh noise as Stray Data.

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Xiang Jun (any pronouns) New York City XJ is a writer/editor originally from the Midwest who enjoys horror, sex, and violence.

Francis Feng (she/her) New York City / Beijing Francis (Ruoxi) Feng is a short fiction writer, poet, and sound artist.

She studied Music Business and Film at New York University for her undergrad degree.

Her works involve using various media to juxtapose, blend, and invert the boundary of dream and social reality, so as to discuss the paradox of individual existential experience.

Lucy Malvada (she/her) West Warwick, Rhode Island

Sara-Cayen (she/they) Instagram: @saracayen Connecticut + Western Massachusetts Sara-Cayen Abubo is a FilipinoAmerican artist and student of life. They can often be found writing about and researching food, love, land, and the many other threads that constantly connect us to one another and that hold life together. She writes to remember, to explore curiosities, and to find peace and healing.

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Water Memories Vic Xu

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Models: AzeliA, Karina Wu Fung Callie Wohlgemuth, V Photos by: Karina Wu Fung Edited by: Callie Wohlgemuth

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I still remember you.

Your leather skin, hardened by your years under the sun, by the red seeping under your clothes and into your bones.

You grace me in my sleep, walking alongside the fibers of my pillow and the concaves of my memory.

You flashed your gummy smile at me, and you had pearls in your eyes despite everything.

With time, Your back sloped like the Atoulfo mangos we grew.

When March comes around, the star fruits have all been picked.

I leave a flower for you.

My dreams are painted with ginger and sandstone swings.

I remember you sitting on our front porch while I swung to you, back and forth, Looking for a soft place to land.

After years of waiting outside just to gaze at my back As the sun peeked out and rays of light seeped through the night, your plum vest and white sleeves wrapped around me.

She still remembers you.

As she sits facing the bookshelf, bounded spines and weathered photos idly stand.

I had never seen my grandma cry before, until then.

And I wondered, where could you have gone?

To my dreams, what a soft place to land.

By Karina Wu Fung 16

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Untitled artwork Lucy Malvada

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Land of Banyans

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What is your name / pronouns?

My name is Jinghong Chen and I use she/her pronouns.

How would you describe your art?

I am very deeply influenced by Chinese folk art. So I always got inspired by, you know, my dreams, and my experience growing up in this coastal city in southern China, where people are superstitious and have a lot of religious practice.

There’s a lot of ancestral worship, and all of these things that are not tangible.

Things like dreams, memories, beliefs, all merged together into this... feeling. I don’t know how to describe it. A lot of what I do is trying to capture that feeling.

What mediums do you usually gravitate to in your art and why?

Cut paper. I feel like cut paper is a folk art. It was not considered an actual art practice in Ancient China. Everyday people cut paper and then put it on their window. So a lot of people do that. My mom’s friend was also a cut paper artist, so when I was very little, I learned how to cut paper from them. I was only in second grade, maybe. I did it for a little bit and stopped, but when I went to art school and I was given assignments and trying to problem solve, I just found myself slowly gravitating towards cut paper. l couldn’t explain it. Muscle memory or something keeps drawing me back to this way of making art. Because a lot of my inspirations come from folk art, and paper itself is already a part of this tradition, I can convey whatever I want a little more effectively than other mediums.

“Mourning as Betrayal”?

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A Chinese Funeral

“There’s this old Chinese saying that your dream is the opposite of your reality.”

In your pieces, “Mourning as Betrayal”? and A Chinese Funeral, you touch on themes of death and grief. What has been your journey with expressing this through your art?

A lot of my pieces dealt with death and grief and that’s mostly inspired by the death of my grandpa. That was just a very important part of me growing as a person. The first time losing someone really important to me impacted me in a lot of ways, and grief is a process. When I was making those pieces, I was at a certain stage where I could comfortably talk about him, instead of processing it internally.

I can make art and then put my feelings out there. Making pieces has become a process of my grief. Maybe what I’m trying to do is, I’m trying to make sense of these things that don’t make sense.. And that’s what a dream does. Maybe that’s why I like them so much. With cut paper, once the sketch and the ideation is set, the cutting itself is very meditative. It gives you a lot of space to sink in and stay alone with your thoughts. Again, that’s a process for whatever emotions I wanted to convey. My personality ties into this process of making.

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What does the word, “dream,” mean to you?

I feel like dreams are just a way that our brain processes the information we receive in the daytime, but has somehow been ignored by us, and dreams are just a way to reprocess them.

Do you feel like dreams that are not informed by your daily life are things that come up from the past?

It could be, it could be emotions. Everyday, we’re just getting all these stimulus, but you can’t process it all at once. It could be information from the past or it could be something that happened today. I don’t know how scientific this is, but I think it’s just a way for your brain to do its thing and to catch up, maybe forcing you to see some things that you purposely want to ignore.

Crab

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What comes to mind when you hear the word, nightmare?

I think it has a negative connotation, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think there’s a fear or something that you voluntarily want to ignore, but the nightmare forces you to face the feeling that you’ve been trying to get away from.

Have you had any recurring dreams/nightmares?

I don’t dream a lot now, which is less fun, but I did have a lot of dreams when I was a kid. I remember a lot of my dreams were about murder or being chased. I did have this recurring dream for like three nights where I was solving a murder case, kind of in the style of this TV show I used to watch. It was in a battlefield. It doesn’t make sense at all, but I can just remember, the tensions were very high.

It was very tense and everyone is trying to catch this murderer in the battlefield and all of a sudden, there are KFC coupons falling out of the sky. I don’t know what that is supposed to mean, maybe I was just craving KFC? And then I woke up, but it happened three times in a row... They weren’t the exact same but somehow it ended with KFC coupons falling out of the sky...

Our team loved the piece, Land of Banyans. What was your process for creating it?

I had just graduated school, so I had a ton of time and energy on my hands. I was slowing down and trying to make a piece that I really wanted to do. I was sketching, and somehow, I kept coming back to the banyan trees.

Where I grew up, we’re the city of banyan trees – they’re just everywhere. So, I started thinking about my childhood and the place, the land that raised me. I wanted to create a piece, a self portrait, but more with what the land symbolizes. I grew up in communist China, and I feel like every day that I’m living right now, and every day that I try to go back and revisit how I grew up, I get a little bit of a new perspective. I was always really 27

Veil and Unveil

A Midsummer Dream

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stunned when things were different than what I remembered. I could watch a news piece or have some current event happen when I was a little kid, and I would have no idea what it was about. Looking back now, when I’m actually starting to understand what really happened, I’m like, ‘wow, I really did not catch any of that when I was a kid.’ It’s kind of crazy to live in this in between. Living in this duality and trying to work around all the censorship in my art, I’m still trying to express myself, but I also don’t want to get anybody, especially my family – who’s still there – into any trouble. When that happens, a lot of symbols, motifs, and innuendos help. Fairy tale storytelling and children’s book style writing comes in and helps.

Branding it as a dream helps. If it’s a dream, then it’s all fictional. How could one get into trouble because of that? I’m trying to get away from the consequences by using this fairy tale...

What’s your experience creating book covers and do you have any future plans for making a children’s book?

I like reading a lot because in a way, it’s like living another life without any consequences. It opens up a lot more perspectives and imaginations for me. So when I am doing book covers, I have to force myself to clear out my thoughts on whatever book that I’m working on. It’s a way for me to, again, help process whatever information I intake. And just kind of let it out – turning it into my own voice, my own thinking. It’s really just combining two things that I like together.

Any book opportunity, I would love to have someone hire me, you know? If an opportunity presents itself, I would say, yes... I think I want to convey whatever emotions or feelings that I feel. I am trying to convey my dreams, memories, feelings, and spiritual beliefs, all merged together into this tangible object. I hope to convey that through my arts because of my own experience. I hope that my experience can speak to more Asian diaspora and community, to help build this connection with everybody that might share the same experience.

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By Sara-Cayen

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Somewhere It’s Breathing Milo Harris

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SURFACE TENSION

Brought into being by partners, Carmen MC Vigilante and Milo Harris, Surface Tension is an immersive multimedia installation that synthesizes light, sculpture, and sound into an aquatic dreamscape. In February 2024, as the full moon rose overhead, the exhibition opened at Horse Room Gallery with live music from Cryptwarbler, Anna Kerber, and Mutter. Horse Room Gallery is part of the Firehouse, an artist-operated music and arts space in Worcester, MA. Organic sculptural forms, inspired by tide pool creatures, creep up the dark wood walls of the gallery space. Two video projectors bathe the room in entrancing, psychedelic footage of rippling water. Half-seen life forms surround a central pool, its wiry spokes softened by draped fabric.

In a ritualized performance of love, loss, and hope, visitors are invited to cast stones, glass shards, and shells into the pool, respectively.

For Milo and Carmen, visiting a body of water feels like a dream. Or, more accurately, an in-between state: dream, nightmare, fantasy, life, all at once, fossilized into a moment. Whether the Woonasquatucket River or the Erie Canal or the Point Loma tide pools, water fuels the emotional landscape of our imaginations. Water is a place and a material and a feeling, a body and a mind and a spirit. Surface Tension is our collective effort to share with others, through sculpture and light, how we experience water.

Our bodies contain water, pushing against the boundary of self and world. When our bodies meet another body of water, the rumblings of instinct become noticeable.

Sculptures and text by Carmen MC Vigilante and Milo Harris 33

Surface Tension is an act of critical fabulation. As trans people, we must create our own worlds: our dreams are a river that carries our own stories, our own love, our own joy.

Surface Tension is a space for meditation, rest, joy, tears, love, offering, music, and community.

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Surface Tension is many places collapsed into one. In our dreams, our brains construct worlds not from the logic of matter, but the unrelenting magnetism of our own subjectivity. It is an in-between space where you can hold the heaviness of it all, and dream in vivid color.

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You lay beneath a rain-toddled window On the flip side of a post-August afternoon, Like a reclining Buddha.

On the other side, there are yesterday’s problems, Eyeing for a chance to beat the moment you ebb out of Buddhahood.

On the other side, you are going to Small claims court for your bereavement of a tourmaline-shaped balcony Endowed only to the higher-ups But what about your two-year monstera Who’s reaching over your run-down Ikea desk, wanting to stroke your nape with its leaves and say: I see your pain.

Where are you gonna live Tomorrow, you hear from the other side, vague Shimmers annotating the contour of your posture.

On the other side, a plane is taking off to the Czech Republic.

He says he loves you and that’s What’s left to pin you down in the torrents That thrust you afloat in a city that never stops.

The plane’s taken off, and he is going to the other side.

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The ocean is impaled by the nuclear curses they spit While you, you as in us, are scheduled to inherit Tantamount curse, for not swallowing the spits for the ocean.

Wildfires are marching over our bodies, the audiobook of shrieks and silence heard from within the memory foam, Seen upon the somatic black sheets of your closed lids.

On the other side, your mother is Just about to wake up to a random morning.

Is she lying like you are, Ambushed in the narrowed stillness of your siesta?

Are you decided to fight Like how she fights with her own flimsy limbs, Years after years?

The scars in your body are growing Darker, raving under your skin. One day they will win and ulcerate, your memory of Your motherland.

But none of it matters, for now.

As you lay beneath the rain-toddled window On the flip side of a post-August afternoon, You are a reclining Buddha.

By Francis Feng

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Fall Head hits pillow.

Body crumples, smile cracks like sidewalk, spine shattering blood wet wanting.

You above me.

Climbing your ribbed rungs, wind and sweat and my heels dangling, slipping.

Waking.

I pretend sleep.

Sunlight healing skin, bed forming bone, remembering dreaming of you.

By Xiang Jun

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By Annie Teoh 43

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I write love poems for people who do not exist

A two toned dance ablaze in the evening blue Our kiss ignites fire brighter than the ones we lay under You share the resemblance of a sun marked horizon Touched beyond the means of physicality, where every breath collapses into an ocean wave As minds and souls connect do we remain strangers?

I find myself comforted in the sullen void of your enchantment For it is a prison made of marble A abyss of planted flowers How could there be enough words to convey my thoughts of you?

Your sensitivity makes the most beautiful of music I could imagine you playing the sounds of our story

By Sofia Perez

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Models: Carmen MC Vigilante, Chloe Wohlgemuth Photos by: Callie Wohlgemuth

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Lucid Lullaby

By Salem Segatore

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tides theres a man theres a man in a room theres a man in a room with a woman freeze dried heart beats orange peeled walls courdory couches covered in plastic theres asbestos on the ceiling theres a boy theres a boy in his room theres a boy in his room with his mom manic pixie dream girlsTM hand print tattoos sleep on a cold bus station bench the sun comes up in 4 hours theres a dad a dad and his son sun and the moon

By Edgar De Dios

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INTERVIEW WITH:

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What is your name / pronouns?

My name is Kyree Saintilus. My pronouns are he/him/his.

How would you describe your art? What inspired your art growing up?

Oh man. Growing up, I got a whole lot of inspiration from Marvel comics, specifically. My uncle would drop these single issues on my lap, which was crazy.

I think he saw me react to the first one and he just kept going. So, as a kid, I had issues one through ten of The Amazing Spider-Man. Those kinds of stories about daily life really stuck with me. As an adult, I see a lot of [Spider-Man] fans be like, “oh, this character means so much more to me because I go back to read the issues and he’s literally doing what I do.” [Spider-Man]’s gotta pay bills now, just like how I gotta do all these mundane things. I still want to be a cool person, I still have ambitions for more. As someone who is in that general demographic, I would like to explore these things in my art. It’s like, ‘okay, I’m interacting with people, I’m creating these bonds and relationships, but where do I see these going? Where do I see myself in the future?’ It’s fun, but it’s also oddly vulnerable in the sense that everyone has these moments and [we] need to be honest about them. Even when they inspire stories that don’t have anything to do with you, the connections are so close. Now, my art is a lot more introspective, more about the self, in [both] the physical and metaphysical sense. I’m creating more stories about mental health [issues] and how people get out of them. My art often becomes an interrogation of the self, and then, community.

What is your process with creating comics?

A lot of the time, I create them like the Marvel method, where I’ll have an idea or things that I imagine in my head that would look cool, and I build a narrative from that. Sometimes, it doesn’t work and I’m like, ‘okay, maybe this could exist as a nice page or two that I just have.’ Other times, I can really build out an idea and have a cohesive, messenger moment that branches out into visual language. And I can still have those cool, snapshot moments, poster moments.

When I am creating comics, I want them to read well. [At the same time], every four pages, I have a moment where this [image] can go on a poster. That’s why I really like single illustrations. Not every piece comes together on the first try.

And I’m glad that it’s not, ‘cause, there may be broken eggshells, [but] you really appreciate the omelette when you get it.

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What does the word, “dream,” mean to you?

For me, “dreams” means possibilities, nowadays at least. A lot of times, dreams are accessible, but they’re just in a place where we don’t know. So, when I think about dreams, I think, ‘oh, here’s a possibility that I would just have to work towards.’ Dreams are cool. As an adult and even as a kid, I have moments where I have out of body experiences. Now being a fully fledged artist, I feel closer to my dreams and seeing that process come into adulthood, it’s really nice.

What are your tangible dreams? How are those similar or distinct from your subconscious dreams?

My tangible dreams – wanting to really devote myself to art and music – have this really weird, silent connection to my subconscious dreams, just because of the way I was introduced to drawing. When I was a kid, my uncle got me my first ever comic book, Amazing Fantasy 15, which featured the first ever appearance of Spider-Man. Around that time, with all those movies coming out, [the art] was in my brain. So, wanting to create comics, I would have a lot of dreams where that connection [between conscious and subconscious] really existed. And then, simultaneously, I would have subconscious dreams where I’m just randomly Spider-Man. It would be like the coolest thing ever. I would be like, ‘oh my gosh, like this is the dream.’ Sometimes, there’d be a sequence of events in my dream that would inspire a comic. This happened recently, when I was in school. Our professor prompted us to draw about our dreams and nightmares, and mine was about a journey, where I was escaping a facility. I had a web like I was SpiderMan, but not really. After I escaped from the facility, I went on a three day odyssey through the woods, so, I drew that. There’s weirdest connection between my tangible dreams and my subconscious dreams, but they feed each other.

What comes to mind when you hear the word, “nightmare”?

When I think of the word, nightmare, it’s not really in the conventional sense where you’re scared or you’re running from Freddy Kruger, you know?

For me, if dreams are our opportunities and possibilities, maybe nightmares are opportunities to learn – to confront things that you’re scared about. I had a nightmare last night where I was confronted by a person that, right now, I just wouldn’t like to see. This person greeted me and their energy was so icky. It was so icky vicky. I did not want to be a part of that. And when I woke up, I think it was an opportunity [for me] to realize that maybe this energy doesn’t serve me.

Nightmares are certainly still scary, because, fuck, like you gotta confront your shadow. You gotta confront your insecurities.

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UNSUNG

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UNANNOUNCED

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UNKNOWN 64

Have you had any recurring dreams/nightmares?

Yeah, Inception really got it right. I have a lot of dreams at the carnival, in office spaces, old apartments, in dorm buildings. Even elementary classrooms, just because those formative memories really show up a whole lot. As an adult, why am I still dreaming about middle school? There are recurring levels to those landscapes. I’ll have a dream that I’ve been in before and I’ll know where to go because my subconscious knows that it’s familiar. And those are really cool opportunities for lucid dreams. They’re usually cool dreams, you know, I’ll be at a carnival and Batman will be there.

What are some themes that you find yourself revisiting a lot in your work?

I revisit the body a lot. When I was nineteen, I was exceptionally skinny. As a kid, you don’t really think about that stuff. Being in Chicago, I was definitely either at home, barely eating, or outside, barely eating. As an adult, I hear about people – who are from spaces that are similar to mine – speak about just being out in the city, grabbing food here and there, but not really eating for long stretches of time.

Then, I came to college where my school has crazy dining services. So, I was eating unhealthily and thinking, ‘why am I like gaining 20 pounds off it?’ I think that stuck with me in a weird way. I don’t see it as a bad thing now, I feel much more comfortable with my body. But as a new adult, I remember thinking, “this fucking sucks.” And then COVID happened. At that point, not only was I uncomfortable with my body, the idea of being connected or sharing my body with someone else is just out of the window because I didn’t wanna catch COVID. That was a crazy time for me. It inspired a crazy series of fifty wet charcoal drawings that were just me in front of the mirror, almost every day. I did a few illustrations where I was very clearly me, but I would change the identity of the person in the piece. It’s like this red guy, stretched out with a super slim stomach, but his thighs are jutted out and you can see his ribs. Even though I’m maybe not interrogating the body as scathingly as I was when I was a kid, a lot of my work considers: how does this body exist in space? What energies lie inside this body? And things like that. I still really like comics and superheroes, but I think those exist as a part of my work. If I did something sci-fi, then there might be gore or the characters might have to use their powers in a way that makes them aware of their bodies.

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What are your artistic intentions with your pieces, “Impending” and “The Beholder”?

Starting with Impending. Again, I’m a super big fan of Marvel comics. As an adult, I really appreciate Marvel comics and illustrators like Jack Kirby and writers like Stan Lee, who understood the human condition. It all hits harder with time, age, and wisdom. I noticed this character, Dr. Doom, from the Fantastic Four comics. He was super broken on the inside, but in a way that fed his ego and vanity, even with the best of intentions. So with this piece, interrogated the idea.

What if there was this ball of light? This person who maybe would have liked to be a guiding force and help people in squalor around him, but even with the best of intentions, they still wear his insecurities and feel the fallout from from his worst traits. I think we see that a lot now. I’m not really super into politics, but I think we have to be now ‘cause shit is scary. We see this a lot with guiding forces in politics and even people in the pop culture sphere, who we, even in the smallest capacity, look up to. We think, ‘oh, this person, we share interest, we share an aesthetic, but, you know, they’re not gonna really save us.’ At worst, we adopt their worst traits. At best, we look at it as a cautionary tale. That largely inspired this piece, Impending.

With The Beholder, speaking of cautionary tales, the biggest one I picked up in school and in life, is Oedipus Rex. As an adult, I really look to the universe. I have faith in the universe, or whatever you wanna call it – God – to show us pieces to give us a larger picture, and at least trust in ourselves.

To know that things will get better. To trust where we’d like to go and at least keep a nice energy, or sense of self.

On the flip side of that, you have this idea of this guy, who, for a long

Impending 66

time tried to run from his future and ended up playing right into it. When I made The Beholder, there’s this idea of this guy who removed his eye, like Oedipus Rex in that Greek tragedy. The eye is still presented with love, even though it’s kind of gory. It’s scary, but it’s dressed up. That’s the approach I took with the piece. It’s pain, but it’s still joy in a weird way. It’s dancing in the rain, in that respect, we still go through tough times. I think that’s inevitable, but it makes the great times that follow it all the better. And we learn from them, you know.

The Beholder 67

Riding into Red Lily Marie Fiore 68

Untitled artwork Lucy Malvada 69

What do lizards dream of? Probably Bugs Jules Z

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Models: Jovan Rocha, V, Krysa Weitzman, Aydin Hayat Photos by: Aydin Hayat, Callie Wohlgemuth, TJ Duft

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Clothos, Lachesis, and Atropos Olympia 86

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Photos by Jorge Wunch 89

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“The ongoing occupation and genocide of Palestinians represents a collective nightmare, not only for those constantly facing bombardment, murder, and famine, but also for all those trapped in the seemingly unceasing wheels of war profiteering, ecological devastation, and racism. The systems in which we in the US live under (economic, social, and cultural) feel like a horrible dream, one in which we are trapped in the ceaseless, violent grind of working life, which directly funds the people and entities killing us at home and those killing others abroad.

The nightmarish terror of this moment, however, is also awakening a majority to the dream of liberation, to the hope of creating a new world that will allow us to heal from the nightmare of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. A dream of life fueled by love and not fear, a dream of relationships of symbiosis instead of domination. A dream of a world where humanity returns home to nature and to ourselves.

In these photos taken at the Feb 27 vigil for Aaron Bushnell and the March 2nd Global Day of Action for Palestine in NYC I hope to convey both the nightmare of the Palestinian occupation and the forces perpetuating it here in the US, but also the dream of hundreds of thousands fighting for liberation.”

Jorge Wunch 93

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I was always afraid of the woman in the picture. On the dim lit wall of my grandmother’s old apartment. Her sharp pale face ran my blood icy hot, and she was draped in a sea of purple and deep blood red. She had a regal essence which intimidated me the most. She watched my grandmother with a sensation of a revived corpse, hoping to consume her. I was afraid that she would tell me secrets about my grandmother. How she would linger on the kitchen knives for a second too long, or how she would pray for a life far away from this one. I could feel her watching me too. I would always straighten my shoulders walking past her and let her admire me. I figured if I impressed her she would not steal my grandmother away. Her stare collapsed upon me at night, lips tight and stuck in decayed smirk. I felt I was disappointing her. Maybe because I was smaller then, and the looks you received meant everything. I held my grandmother tighter after that. There came a day where the painting disappeared from the wall. I stopped performing. I slouched my shoulders. When my grandmother left, so did she.

By Sofia Perez

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Game Over Lancelot

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ARTIST STATEMENTS Salem Segatore (he/him) Portland, Oregon Salem is someone who loves the power of words but has only recently decided to push the boundaries with their work.

They’re in their second term at Portland State University studying creative writing, and have learned a lot about themselves and the craft that goes into creating a piece.

They’re very excited to be able to share their work alongside other artists, and extremely grateful to the wonderful folks at Echoz for allowing them a place to do just that <3 Edgar De Dios (he/him) Passaic, New Jersey Edgar De Dios is a Mexican American artist from northern New Jersey.

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Lily Marie Fiore Riverside, Rhode Island Lily’s day job is a Project Manager for the Taunton Housing Authority. Her passion is photography, it gives her an outlet to be creative. To try and see the world differently and to capture the magical moments within it.

Kyree Saintilus (he/him) Instagram: @spxrittt, Twitter: @kyreesaintart Providence, Rhode Island Kyree Saintilus is an American illustrator from Chicago, Illinois, focusing on sequential art and animation. These pieces are often fantastical and supernatural short comics discussing how individual experiences inform the body, its growth, and its change. His colorful work has appeared in the Chicago Cultural Center, the Black Biennial at the RISD Museum, and the Society of Illustrators.

Jules Z (they/them) Providence, Rhode Island Jules Z is an interdisciplinary zinemaker, illustrator, and amateur forager. If you hang out with them enough times they’ll probably draw your fursona. You can view more of their art online @juleszuckerberg on instagram and @juleshroom on bluesky and visit their webstore justrightzines.com!

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Jorge Wunch (any pronouns) Brooklyn, New York Jorge uses photography, videography, music, and sound to make the familiar unfamiliar and shine a light on the complex systems that humanity has surrounded ourselves in. Their goal is to show that the relationships we form with our own minds, our communities, and our environment are intricately connected and profoundly impact us in every way. In this manner, to heal our minds, our relationships, and our planet we must radically change the way we see the world and our place in it.

Olympia (she/her) Instagram: @olympiyuh Texas Spiritual healer & philosophy nerd.

Sofia Perez (she/her) New York City Born and bred in the streets of new york. Sofia writes poetry not only as a creative outlet but because of the immense joy it brings her. She also tends to write about more complex supernatural themes.

Lancelot (he/they) Providence, Rhode Island Lance is a transmasc artist whose work is driven by narrative and fantasy. He draws and paints with jewel tones to imbue life, and they love using a playful, cartoony style to create unique characters and environments.

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THE TEAM TJ Duft he/him

Krysa Weitzman she/her/it/its

we are ech(o)z. we are a group of creatives whose main mission is to uplift and collaborate with the voices of the unseen and unheard. our collective experiences echo through multimedia creation. we hope you join us on our journey.

t aya H in ey Ayd e/th h

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nightmares are monsters we run from. truths we may not want to face. all of our fears becoming reality.

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ISSUE 3: DREAMS & NIGHTMARES

2024