...my meditation practice these days, it’s getting too strong, you know?

do you see, i wanna linger as me. i want to haunt a house, and i know perhaps that’s a quaint dream, you know, unoriginal, but it’s mine, nonetheless. i mean, imagine. to night after night, to night after night just watch television behind someone watching television. [audience laughing] just giving yourself over to their programming choices. i mean, that… that would be a meditation in its own right, the surrender required there, you know. i just, uh… i wanna be a ghost, but if I make it as a ghost, i wanna be a strong ghost, a robust ghost, you know. no blurring away at the edges for me. i want to be 75% opacity at minimum. [audience laughing] i’d say 85 max. i want you to know i’m a ghost, otherwise what’s the point.” — Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees (2024)

“perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor…” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“i wrote in Bird by Bird that ‘perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, it’s the voice of the enemy,’ and i grew up with a lot of shame; i grew up with pretty unhappy parents who were married 27 unhappy years… so that my solution and something my parents encouraged was the perfectionism…  i had such shaky self-esteem and such a raging ego, this terrible ping-pong game going on... i’m a little neurotic because i’ve also had a lifelong eating disorder, so i feel that if you don’t get 10,000 steps a day you can’t tell where you’re going to end up. before recovery i got all of my value from how other people thought of me. the miracle of being older is that you might go to the same default places. mine is this victimized self-righteousness and this weaponized silence, but you move through it in two or three hours instead of months, and in one case an entire decade…” — Anne Lamott on Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus

adds $10,000 worth of shoes to cart, cannot decide, purchases nothing. precious time lost to the screen. could have walked 10,000 steps. could have been painting. paints shoes from cart and claims she is a painter who uses screen-based distractions to her advantage.

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hailey nathel (b. 1996) is a painter who uses interdisciplinary methods and screen-based distractions to her advantage. In 2018, hailey received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied Painting and Psychological & Brain Sciences. Since then, she has worked as a yoga instructor, a curator and cofounder of artist collective gadget_gurls, an Arts Admissions coach & tutor, and a scenic artist for Showtime, ABC, and Hulu television shows. She is currently based in Northern California and pursuing a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Visual Arts at UC Berkeley Extension.

Seeing the world through a cyberfeminist lens, hailey uses sincerity and humor to explore Mirror [painting / time-based media], Shadow [photography / drawing], and Glitch [digital painting / DIY printing] as visual and conceptual motifs: 

♡ Her participatory painting project, #theMirrorMemoirs  (WIP), uses interpretations of “mirror-selfie” shared on Instagram to create paintings that look at gender roles on and offline, while raising money for Alzheimer’s research.

♡ Through photography and drawing, she’s also been casually exploring shadow as reflection and mirror’s counterpart. And eventually, in her next series of paintings, she plans to use shadow to tackle Facebook—Instagram’s predecessor and #tMM’s prequel.

♡ Her digital series, Seasonal glitches, is an infinite evolution of digitally produced colorful disruptions. By engaging with the intended uses and creative failures inherent in personal technology, hailey leverages mishap as a catalyst for discovery and [re]invention.

While esthetics may vary by medium, her focus remains on looking at the way we see, using the eyes of her embodied and digital-self—as they become one and the same.