Letter from the Editor:

Since COVID-19 first began impacting our lives, we’ve allowed ourselves to sink into our utmost selves and consider how we want to contribute to a post-pandemic society.

The home we call Earth, which we always thought of as robust, mother-like, and capable of withstanding anything, can, in reality, only take so much, until she collapses.

With an uncertain world at the cusp of destruction, we took the approach of considering it in a gamified sense — the fate of the world is in your hands. Do you submit to it’s industrialized destruction, or defy these conventions and adopt sustainable solutions? Our shoots represent two directions in which humans respond to the pressing environmental issues we currently face.

Scrutinizing America’s past, Epiphany is first contextualized in Critiquing the Familiar (pg 10). By giving our team members an opportunity to conceptualize a print shoot, this collaborative project first investigates the contrived aesthetics and societal flaws of 1950s suburban Americana. Features writer Hannah Treister asserts,“though I recognize the stability afforded by community playgrounds and a lush front lawn, I also realize how many are excluded from this utopia, and how many within it have been left to navigate the dystopian nightmare of conventionality completely alone.”

Many of us have the privilege to call these suburbs home, but considering the truism, ‘hindsight is the best foresight,’ it’s imperative to determine what we want to make of this past. What are we changing? What are we embracing? What are we submitting to? These questions lead us into the obscurity of the unknown.

In Haze (pg 16), the dark, obfuscated imagery reflects the uncertainty we have with our existence. We symbolize paper airplanes as vehicles of pollution in order to question if we are arbitrarily handling our Earth and resources.

As we grapple with our perceptions of the world, William Neumaier argues that we are currently living amid a dystopia. This year fulfills each of the five pillars of dystopian living, and Neumaier concludes that, “It’s so very important that we as a society take this time of turmoil and distress and let the art around us teach us something about the world.”

The game continues as we choose the path of taking more than we can give. Because climate change is expected to worsen the intensity and impacts of extreme weather, we depict the polarized duality of frigidity and hellish heat on an overused Earth. Farenheights (pg 26) expresses that fashion will most likely respond to this dilemma in a way where people adapt trash and found objects into wearables to survive.

In Pseudo-topia, Soneida Rodriguez contemplates the way in which one might need to exist in order to survive in a perfect world. “I loved every minute of evolving; I just wished I was better at it. Looking back only left you behind. Living in the age of right now was a true utopia.”

Then, we take a step back and look at Earth as a Visitor (pg 38). We are in passing — viewing the world as something devoid of the possibility of growth.

After presenting the narrative of humans burning through Earth, we pivot and start to think about the solutions we can enact now to combat our current challenges.

In Fashion for Every Body (pg 48), Lauren Champlin discusses how current designers and fashion icons question gender labels and assimilate nonbinary clothing. During this pandemic, Champlin states how “little thought has been given to the ways that people of non-normative gender identities are harmed in the wake of this global climate crisis.”

Viewing the Earth as a precious entity to nurture, Flora Aurora (pg 50) is our representation of humans deciding to embrace nature and view it as something to coexist with instead of exploit.

Our features embedded in Epiphany float more and more into abstractness, yet the important topics and underlying messages remain. In Mother (pg 58), Heba Malik’s metafictional narrative tackles the pressing issues of what we’re facing by exploring the relationships we as humans have to Earth.

Finally, we land in a distant destination where the equilibrium between human and nature has prospered over time — where a utopia is achieved.

By stretching your mind and then pulling you back to reality, we hope these human journeys will lead you to your own epiphany.

–Natalie Guisinger, Editor-in-Chief