AZ: It’s because of all of the people who are doing music, they also do visual art. Even some of them are visual artists, they just do music on the side. But I was doing music at first. It's like slowly getting to more visual art. I guess also because I'm a little bit converted. I don't like if you're doing music you have to travel and change your environment a lot. There's always a lot of people drunk so I just really didn't like that environment which gave me so much stress. I still love music. I want to do music but the practice itself didn't fit me well. The older I get the less I can do it.
Back in Pennsylvania, we needed to do things like these DIY venues. If you want to see this band you need to figure out how to invite them here, what kind of lineup you want to have, and we don't have any venues so it's usually inside of someone's apartment in the basement. we did this thing called Illegal Fest which was on the top of the mountain. It was totally illegal, and you have to drag all of your equipment up a mountain and then just have a music festival there. It's all organized by students, and I was in bands in college. I wasn't the organizer for most of these things but I was observing other people doing it, and I was really appreciative of what they did so that we can see bands we like and I can perform.
When I moved to New York, I felt like I was growing into that role, maybe being presented wasn't my foremost goal anymore. I really admire people who can create a space for other people, and I wanted to try it. I always had that thought I didn't know I was gonna do it but I started to get curious about what a space would look like over my budget. I started looking at apartments just for fun and then I saw that apartment, and I thought everything was just folded into place because I just had visuals of it being an apartment gallery. I think a big plus is that it has a backyard so my cat can go out. But it wouldn't make any sense if I'm just renting a place this big and expensive just for my cat to go out. So it's like a lot of elements combining together. I think it's time to do it.