Kezia Velista

“I can’t be in Flushing for too long,” writes featured photographer and writer Kezia Velista, “Jewelry stores with misaligned Chinese characters with the hanyu pinyin letters below them remind me of you. The night of your death, I found bars of gold hidden in the pockets of your black leather jacket. I can’t be in Flushing for too long.”

Velista’s exceptional “Fever Dreams of the F Word” explores grief, coping, and life after loss. After moving to New York from Atlanta in 2015, Flushing reminded her most of her hometown in Jakarta, Indonesia, despite the language barrier that made her feel like an outsider. Velista’s father, the main subject of the piece, passed away from Stage 4 cancer right before the pandemic struck New York. Flushing, Queens is where they spent their last months together. “Every single time I went to Flushing, I just felt that urgency to write about him,” she said, “but then every single time I felt the urgency to write about him, I was like, ‘Am I representing my family correctly?’ There were all these worries about how I’d be representing my family, or how I’d be representing my dad especially, who’s no longer here. But then, I finally went to Flushing this one time, and I just started writing on the train from Flushing to Queensborough, so that’s quite a long time for me to process my thoughts.”

“Fever Dreams of the F Word” and “The One After the One” were Velista’s first attempts at taking creative writing seriously. “I hesitated on speaking on the topics I’ve written about,” she said, “because I guess I just wasn’t sure how it would be received by people, especially people who know me personally.”

“The One After the One,” a much shorter piece, gets its title from a play on the commonly spoken “They’re the one!” expression. “It’s a bit of a nudge or jab at monogamy,” Velista said, “and the fact that oftentimes when we commit ourselves to ‘the one,’ there is possibility of another one after that, and the piece highlights the complications of monogamy culture.” With a laugh, Velista noted that her intentions were never to “trash” monogamy culture. “It’s just this strange push and pull of giving ourselves entirely to somebody and them not being able to give themselves in return and the momentary lapse of thoughts even when you’re with them.”

“Every single time it’s brought him to an indescribable— To give power, is to also take power. Every single time it’s rendered both of them utterly— To restrict him is to set him free.”

Velista’s visual work, which she considers herself more familiar with, depicts both private moments of intimacy and the vast unknown of a New York City skyline.

“If I were to put my visual work into words,” she said, “I like exploring themes of vulnerability, intimacy, sensuality. It’s not so much sexual energy, but it’s the level of intimacy where that might not be advertised as much: tenderness, intimacy between friends, familial intimacy because I think oftentimes the most knowing forming of intimacy in movies or in TV shows is like this romantic sexual intimacy and I’d like to be able to show different sides of intimacy that exist.”

Her piece “You’ve Been Here Before” is both a written and a visual piece. Originally, the piece was meant to be just a photograph of her two friends, their faces blocked out with intention of keeping them anonymous. “If it was just the image or if it was just the text, the energy wouldn’t have translated fully, so I wanted to pinpoint exactly the intensity of the moment,” she said.

Contrasting to the vulnerability of “You’ve Been Here Before,” her two pieces “Some Versions of Night” and “Some Versions of a Night 2” blur the lines between what is private and public — the New York City skyline from a bedroom window. Velista emphasized the complicated relationship with New York that she’s had. After the initial move to the city, she was not planning to stay after finishing school, with a plan to move back to Atlanta or somewhere completely new, but her plans seem to have changed. “I feel a strange stickiness to the city,” she said, “I’m sure a lot of other people who moved here or have been here their whole lives feel this inexplicable stickiness to the city that’s comforting and uncomforting at the same time.”