Meredith Starr & Dayna Leavitt: A Transatlantic Collaboration
Meredith Starr, an interdisciplinary artist in New York, and Dayna Leavitt, a photographer in London, are former roommates and started their collaborative project, Are You There?, to stay connected during the pandemic. What started as a daily creative challenge in a time of global uncertainty has transformed into a stunning array of imagined landscapes.
How did your creative journey begin?
We’ve been friends over 20 years and spent the last 12 living in separate cities (NY and London) with an ocean between us. In the past, we’ve shown independent work together and even attempted some collaborations but never really sustained it, so it was interesting that our current collaborative project Are You There? began back in 2020 as a way to stay connected during pandemic lockdowns. It actually happened quite organically as we were both stuck at home, looking for ways to make our spaces feel less confined and repetitious and inject little moments of joy and creativity to our daily lives during such strange times. We found ourselves sending daily messages to each other to show what the other was seeing or doing, often sharing photos of odd corners of rooms, shadows we’d never noticed before, food scraps, street views, and really anything that we thought the other might find striking. It became a daily creative challenge to make something mundane suddenly feel interesting and beautiful to share with each other. Then one day we spotted an art show open call and decided it could be an interesting project to collage some of our daily images to create these imagined landscapes of where it felt like we were sharing an experience and a view, despite our great differences in physical distance and time. In retrospect, our first attempts were a little crude and our application wasn’t accepted, but it was definitely the launch pad to a meaningful, intentional and sustained collaborative project.
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
Our inspiration is quite organic and our imagery tends to find themes or color palettes that are more symptomatic than preplanned. The reality is that so much of this project is that inspiration comes from each other. When you’ve lived with someone, you know what they might appreciate seeing, or that they might share in the joy of a personal discovery- even if it’s quirky. So for example, if one of us finds shapes in tree barks that resemble faces, or colorful swirls of ice cream, or an overly wooly lamb, it’s likely the other will naturally be drawn to discover similar visuals and send those in reply over the next days, and weeks. Very often we’re drawn to what’s literally right outside our window- you might notice a fox as a recurrent motif in our work, both in sound and imagery. Another fun behind the scenes fact is that our titles are drawn from snippets of text messages. It’s always enjoyable to see them recontexualized.
How has your work evolved over the last few years?
The most significant evolution of our work has probably been taking our 2D digital images and bringing them to life in our VR experience You Are Here where viewers can be fully immersed in our constructed spaces. This also includes an audio soundtrack built from collections of sounds from our daily lives and travels, ranging from washing machines to beach waves, street noise, and even urban foxes.
What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?
Dayna is a night owl which thankfully suits our 5 hour time difference, so we often find ourselves on late night chats or messages to agree on the final iterations of a piece. In starting a new work, we’ll typically work independently and then leave it for the other to find and explore, add or evolve into something new. Even after being a few years into the project, each time we open our files to see the other’s new shares, it’s still really exciting, almost like opening a present. We sometimes have dozens of iterations of a single work that can take so many different forms before we finally nail the final version, and sometimes we don’t even resolve it for several months when suddenly a new image becomes the missing piece to complete the puzzle.
Which experiences have impacted your work as an artist?
The end of lockdowns certainly had an impact on the imagery in our works, mainly because we were able to travel and move around the outside world again, so we were able to visually capture so much more. It was almost like a rebirth of the project.
How has social media impacted your art career?
While admittedly social media profiles can be quite a lot of work to maintain, it’s a brilliant tool to connect with other artists and curators and also a resource for inspiration and information. It’s also nice to have a more casual platform to share works in progress or daily photo captures, or most definitely to promote new art openings or announcements about our project.
What are your future goals and aspirations?
The photographs from Are You There? Create artificial landscapes, and we’re working towards a solo show where seeing many of them in the same space could create an entire narrative of an escapist reality. We’re playing with new media as well, seeing if video collage and new sound works might also create more interactive opportunities when engaging with the imagery.
Website: www.meredithstarr.com/work/are-you-there
Instagram: @areyouthere_project