I don’t even know why I was so into her specifically, but I remember every day after school I would ask my mom to buy me a tabloid so I could find an image of her and cut it out. I watched Freaky Friday, of course, but the reason I was really drawn to her was that she wasn’t like the other Disney characters or child stars who had a very fixed identity. She was cast in all these different roles. Sometimes she played the outcast girl, like in Mean Girls, and I really resonated with that.

And then there was her rebellious phase. Even though I didn’t really understand what she was going through, there was something I felt connected to.

I basically pretended to be a cat for a lot of my childhood. I wore cat ears and a tail. It was a whole thing. When I made those half-human, half-animal collages, I was collecting Ranger Rick and magazines like Tiger Beat, Bop, and J-14.

I think I was trying to bring together the side of me as a kid that was the animal and the side that was like, “Okay, I have to start being a human.” I was about to enter second grade, and I remember my friends starting to wear skirts and all this stuff. I was very much a tomboy. I don’t know if I realized what I was doing then, but looking back, it feels like I was trying to bring those two parts together.

The active imagination of a child is so special. I wanted to get back to that imaginative state before all the societal conditioning—before you feel like you have to be a certain way and fit in.

When I saw the collages again, I was also going through a big spiritual phase and thinking a lot about identity. In Jewish mysticism, there’s the human soul and the animal soul. Psychology talks about something similar, too: the animalistic drive that acts out of survival or pleasure, and the more conscious, aware side. I felt like I was trying to bring those two parts of myself together.

As humans, we crave control. We want to defy nature, especially these days. We want to go against our natural drives, or things that happen to us naturally, like aging. I thought the collages were an interesting way of addressing that duality within us.

That’s a separate body of work, but it’s very much in line with the idea of the human as machine—trying to change your current state to a more optimized version through machines and repetition.

It’s funny how the looksmaxxing trend happened around that time, and now there are still all these other things, like longevity or wellness. It’s like you have to take a million supplements every day if you want to feel normal, or be your best version of yourself.

I was a very serious athlete. I was into competitive swimming, track, and cross country. It’s crazy to say now, but as a kid I was pretty immersed in the art world and city life, and I was almost burnt out by 14. I thought, “I just want to become an athlete and live in the suburbs.” My dad had family in Texas, so we moved to Corpus Christi, and I focused more on swimming.

Then I went through a rebellious phase and got kicked off the team for smoking weed. It was kind of this moment of, “Okay, now I don’t have swimming. What am I going to do?” We came back to New York, and I slowly started getting back into art, though I was more interested in graphic design at first. But I was always drawing. Drawing never left me. When I took art classes at Brooklyn Friends, they became a grounding thing for me.

I was so out of touch with the New York people I knew. I barely knew anything about the art scene. When I got my first show through Leo Fitzpatrick at Public Access, I was obviously grateful and thrilled, and ready to show the Lindsay works, but I almost didn’t fully understand what was going on.

When I was making those works, I mostly hung out in the studio and was pretty isolated. The people who came to the show were almost my first friends and my first real exposure to the scene.

New York has this revolving-door nature to it. New people come in, people leave, and new scenes and crowds come through. Having seen that cycle happen has made me reflect on where I fit in and where I belong as an artist.

I’d never really done school full-time before. I’d always done it part-time because of painting, and I wanted to jump in and try art school for the first time. It’s exciting, though incorporating a full class schedule with the art stuff has been a lot. I like to stay busy, but I’m also figuring out how to be more selective.

I’m realizing, too, that software is being incorporated into every field, including creative ones. It’s something we can’t really escape, so I thought I might as well learn how to use it.