We recently connected with Hypnocatist and have shared our conversation below.

Hypnocatist, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Externally, the most meaningful project that I’ve worked on has been art for causes and relief funds. During the pandemic, a group of friends and I started taking commissions for donations, specifically for antiracism organizations. We would get on skype calls together to work on the commissions and reflect on thoughts and information related to BLM and racism in general, and things we noticed in our own lives and how we operated that might be contributing to the problem or helping it. It was meaningful to create for a purpose and a way to cope with the helplessness that can come with awareness of larger societal issues. Recently, we formed the “Queer Artists Relief Collective” with a similar but broader purpose – creating art in exchange for donations to humanitarian relief funds. Four of us in the collective created a zine for donations around the theme “Solidarity With The Oppressed People of the World”, which has been accepted to the San Francisco Zine Fest this year. The linktree with the causes can be found on the @queerartistsreliefcollective IG account.

Internally, the most meaningful project that I’ve worked on has been a “Release to Emerge” concept that has been iterated through multiple performances. It started with a fire spinning concept that starts with me in a creature state, finding the light and reflecting on what I need as an oracle, releasing as a grim reaper with a fire scythe, and emerging as a fire phoenix. This concept was performed at a festival called Rush Hour (an Asian & black art exhibit) and at Satarah Bloom, marking the beginning of my emergence as a professional artist both in visual art and as a performer. The underlying concept of Release to Emerge has been recreated and performed as part of Circus Something, Cirque du Biere, Zoe Jakes’ projects, and other settings. It combines multiple of my disciplines (visual art, different movement practices, costume making, music, poetry) and has allowed me to lean into being able to do it all and not feel like I have to give up an interest or a passion. Instead, it allows me greater range to create and meet people with different perspectives. The Release to Emerge concept is especially meaningful to me because my art is how I transmute things I’ve been through, and this one in particular has helped me work through letting go of a lot that I’ve struggled with in CPTSD and other mental health issues to keep emerging more and more each time. It’s actually gotten to the point where I’m feeling disconnected from performing the creature portion of the acts and is becoming harder and harder for me to tap into it and feel authentic representing it, which is a huge sign of how far I’ve come in healing and reinforcing my mental health.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a multi-disciplinary artist that experiences art as a spiritual practice. I do visual art, performing art (fire, dance, aerial), poetry, experimental bass, body art, and costume making. My earliest memory of doing visual art is writing letters and drawing pictures to my mom when she would be away for long periods of time to work. Being an artist is often seen as a waste of time in my culture, so I’ve had an on and off relationship with it. I majored in architecture and civil engineering in college, architecture being the closest I could get to majoring in art at the time. After college, I took my first abstract art class and it unlocked a totally different part of my brain and self. Coming from a lot of rigidity (OCD thinking, my family, the culture, and architecture), abstract art was like bursting open into freedom, with expression, noticing, and creating as the focus and priority. At the same time I was building my meditation practice and developing a relationship with spirituality. Art became a form of meditation and spiritual practice – the flow state for me is like the highest form of being present with something and feels like a connection between myself and a higher being. I began writing in the same way, and noticed that a lot of my stream of consciousness would emerge as poetry. I joined a group called “Writing as a Spiritual Practice” which helped me clarify that art and writing for me was a spiritual practice. A lot of my writing and art has been done while virtually co-working with people. There’s something really beautiful about sharing space with people in this way and I’m really grateful to have spent so much time creating with community and friends. We would get into a video chat and go with the flow – sometimes we would be in complete silence the whole time, immersed in our art pieces. Sometimes one person would be sharing most of the time, with the other listening. Sometimes we would get onto the call with the full intention to do art and end up not doing any at all. I loved how open and accepting of where we were. There were rarely expectations and we found ourselves consistently showing up often (and still do), despite our busy schedules. My friend Maya lives in Japan and is one of the people I’ve done art skypes the most with and we live in opposite time zones. :) Most of my art is imbued with the experiences I had when I was making them or in my life in general. There’s something powerful in being able to share space with people that understand you and inspire you to keep going.

At the beginning of my aerial journey, I was in an amazing circus residency at Sweet Retreats in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. I’m grateful to have meet people that I’m still close with to this day. Being there and focusing so much time on training and being an artist helped me grow in a lot of way and there’s also something important in spending time learning something in a structured way. The people you’re surrounded by really matter, like with the art skypes, spending so much time with people passionate and fun and open really allowed me to blossom into my true self. My focus for this residency was connecting to movement as a spiritual practice – seeing if I could bring what I experience when creating visual art and writing into physical movement and experimenting with what factors increased or decreased the likelihood of being able to access that spiritual flow state. The 10 week residency ended with a performance and my goal was to fully improvise my performance to see if I could access deep spiritual flow state in a higher pressure situation (like having an audience watch). This experience really helped me work through a layer of self doubt that exists – it was challenging at times to see people develop their acts and rehearsing and refining it over the 10 weeks and to work in a more abstract way of developing my act and trusting that I was strengthening my skills and my relationship to listening to myself and what I need to create. When I’m able to achieve that presence of really paying deep attention to the moment you’re in, it feels like channeling and there’s nothing like that feeling.

I started playing bass in the same way – really listening for things I liked as I experimented and looping them to create a song. For me it’s a practice of listening to what wants to be communicated and letting that speak for itself.

I started fusion bellydance from seeing a Beats Antique show and being completely mesmerized by Zoe Jakes’ performance. I had never seen anything like it before and left really curious about it. I saw that she was teaching an intermediate/advanced level workshop and asked the organizer if I could show up even though I had never taken a class before. It was really challenging and I immediately fell in love with it, starting a journey of taking dance intensives and classes.

I’m really grateful to all the amazing teachers I’ve had and all of the community support and the incredible people I’ve met. It really matters to have people who believe in you, support you, inspire you, and want to see you do well and grow. I’m also really lucky to have experienced so many beautiful and fulfilling connections. I’m also super grateful to all the people who took a chance and gave me an opportunity to create freely and as myself.

Something I’m really proud of is how far I’ve come in my mental health. I really struggled for many years with cPTSD from a complex situation and art has continuously helped me process and heal. Art gave me an outlet to express and process what I was going through, as well as community to support me through it. The muscle isolations in bellydance helped me re-connect to my body after years of dissociation by bringing focus to one specific part of my body and repeating drills until I learned the movement. Bellydance, aerial, and fire spinning all helped me reconnect to a childlike feeling of joy and interest that helped me move forward and be in community with other people passionate about creativity. The concepts I wrote and performed helped me work through and transform myself. A lot of my art is about being present and transmuting. The art exhibit I did with Rush Hour: You Can Open Up Now with the prompt I had selected on “How Our Parents Said “I Love You” featured 24 pieces – 9 frames that had contained a pair of paintings with 3 pairs that invited visitor participation to write their own (and would be burned during my fire performance at the end of the festival). The painting on top represents some of the hurtful things my family has said, written into food that evokes a memory from my childhood. Food was often used to show love, while verbal communication from my family utilized hurtful, critical, and shaming language. The bottom piece shows the food cooked or eaten with the words reimagined and rewritten from a more empathetic and compassionate perspective – what could our families have said instead if they had healthier communication skills? What were they really trying to communicate? Can we find healing for ourselves and for those relationships by digging deeper past the words they used?

I really believe in the potential that art has to improve our lives and to make an impact on other people’s lives. Currently I’m looking to collaborate more with other artists, find a tattoo apprenticeship, perform more, show my artwork more, and keep creating as much as I can.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn (and am still unlearning) is believing that I had to be a certain way and do things a certain way. I had a lot of people pleasing tendencies and wanted to be liked and accepted by everyone at the cost of my own freedom and expression. It felt more important to me to avoid conflict and uncomfortable feelings so I would never disagree or voice my own opinions and would say yes to anything. Learning to practice radical honesty, clear communication, and conflict resolution skills has made a huge impact on my life. It’s allowed me to form more meaningful relationships, feel closer to my existing relationships, and be more visible in showing who I really am. Radical honesty with others and myself has helped me redirect a lot of mental energy that I was expending trying to maintain an image and overthinking interactions and wondering if people were upset with me or judging me. Radical honesty has attracted others who have the same value and it’s been the basis of a lot of deep, meaningful and peaceful relationships where we feel safe naming how we’re feeling, holding space for the other person, and resolving conflicts and miscommunications quickly so that resentment doesn’t build. Radical honesty with myself has allowed me to more efficiently grow and look more clearly and directly at the things I want to improve on and the things I want to do more of.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think something that non-creatives will struggle to understand about my journey as a creative is the amount of work that goes into it that is often unseen, especially with the kind of art that I do. Training and classes can get expensive and add up, and the perception that we should just do what we do for free because we love it is unrealistic and keeps the art form from advancing and being passed on through the generations. I also sometimes hear non-creatives say that they could never do what we do as if it were impossible to do it without being born a certain way and I want to share that for most of my life I thought I couldn’t dance and that I was really awkward and could never perform because I would get so nervous. I never considered myself a dancer until a few years ago and never thought I would perform professionally and I think it’s important to remember that the factor that changes your ability to do something is passion and grounded consistent action.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://hypnocatist.godaddysites.com/
• Instagram: hypnocatist

Image Credits

I gave descriptors in case the file name doesn’t show up:

IMG_20240702_142048_838 (Pink): Andrea Wedig

A7C09244 (Body art): Sami Graham

Bloom_Inception_LRZ-1732-(ZF-8908-51178-1-001) (Fire, Reaper): Eric Cutchin (Photoartoftec)

DSC_2101-2 (Fire, Phoenix): Shaun Hollingsworth

_86A6613 (Interactive piece) : Terence Rushin

hi-brew-26 (Red hands): Freddy Franklin Burgess

IMG_6799 (Orange dress aerial): Stu Polks

IMG_20240702_141944_218 (Blue): Andrea Wedig

IMG_20241030_094329_204 (Oracle Eyes): Jon Bauer