Proof of Life: A Conversation with our Artists in Residence (Part 1/3)

Before the work takes shape. Before audiences gather. Before anything is presented publicly, lives are being lived in real time.

Proof of Life begins there.

We sat down with Yannick Lowery, Andres Cisneros, and Taj Rauch, three artists currently in residence at Painted Bride Project Space, and asked them a simple question. What followed was anything but simple.

Outside of your work, how do you personally demonstrate proof of life?

It is a question that sounds philosophical, but we asked it plainly. What do you do? How do you stay present? What keeps you tethered to the world when the work is not happening?

The answers moved from the personal to the communal. From backyards with grass to abandoned underground pools. From the memory of a neighborhood to the feeling of watching strangers live.

Yannick Lowery

Yannick was quick to complicate the premise and then to deepen it.

“I think the work that I do is so closely linked with my life. It is all-consuming, so it’s hard to make a clear delineation between the two.”

But pressed a little, he offered something more specific. He described himself as a serial hobbyist, skating, playing table tennis, and spending time outdoors. Not as escapes from his practice, but as extensions of it.

“All of those things feed into the work. So it’s like there is no split, really.”

What he put in writing, though, went further. The connection between how he lives and what he makes is not just about leisure or observation. It runs directly into the terrain of his current project: what gets remembered, and by whom.

“This idea of proof of life has a direct alignment with my interest in unearthing lost narratives in Black communities. Essentially, I’m trying to preserve the spaces that a census can’t count, developing an archive and resource by and for these spaces to remember.”

For Yannick, being alive and making work about being alive are the same act. The serial hobbyist and the archivist are the same person.

“Life is good, you know. Try to enjoy it.”

Andrés Cisneros

Andres took the question somewhere deeper. He began with a simple image, wanting a backyard with grass, wanting to plant his feet in the morning and be present, and then widened it.

“I have concrete. I’m in West Philly, so I have a concrete jungle. And Caracas, my birthplace, is one of the concrete jungles of the Western Hemisphere.”

For Andres, being grounded is not a luxury. It is a practice, rooted in family, in cultural history, and in a hard-won awareness of the world he moves through.

“Being grounded is always staying rooted in family, our family principles, which are rooted in love and in a deep sense of pride for our family histories.”

He spoke about the layered experience of being an immigrant, the years of watching carefully, of moving through this country with a particular kind of attention. And now, as a citizen, carrying that same awareness forward.

“Proof of life is being aware of all that. Being rooted, understanding where I am, and being always aware of family and the importance of family and the external community where we are.”

Then, almost as an aside, he added what may be the simplest and most complete answer of the three.

“Mother nature and being in tune with it, and then human nature, being in tune with the human nature that’s around us.”

Taj Rauch

Like Yannick, Taj resisted the split between work and life. But his answer moved toward observation, toward what he called witnessing.

“I enjoy going to record stores and asking for recommendations. My partner gets annoyed sometimes with the number of times that I ask questions to staff or whoever is on site.”

He described it as a way of knowing a place through its people. Not the building. Not the menu. The person behind the counter who has been there longer than you have been visiting.

“Whether it’s a restaurant or a record store, I always like to know the people that are there, way longer than we visit them. I want to know from them first, like, what do you enjoy about this place? What’s worth it to make this experience right?”

But the most striking moment came when Taj described something quieter, sitting in a corner of a packed dive bar after a long gig, watching.

“It’s not always about proving that I’m alive, but watching the rest of the world and seeing them alive makes me feel good. I just like to observe people being people.”

That landed somewhere in the room. Because it pointed to something the three artists seemed to share: a way of being present not just in their own experience, but in each other’s. In ours.

Yannick responded directly.

“We’re all each other’s witnesses. And without that, there’s something in just knowing that there’s company and community and engaging with one another in random ways, even not even speaking, just seeing each other genuinely. Being witnessed and also being a fellow witness to everyone else.”

A Place. A Song. A Reset.

We also asked each artist to answer a few rapid questions, small windows into daily life.

What’s on repeat right now?

Taj: Radiohead, In Rainbows.

Yannick: “Jill Scott’s new album came out. I didn’t love the album, but it made me revisit the older albums. So I’ve been stuck in her first album right now, Who Is Jill Scott. That album has been on. Quintessential Philly stuff. I had to go back to why I fell in love with Philly.”

Andrés pointed to a lesser-known album from the early 2000s, Cuban bassist Cachaito’s self-titled record, featuring percussionist Anga Diaz.

“It came out during the time that I started falling in love with Philly, through The Roots, Jill Scott, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Angie Stone. Like, I was like, from Caracas, yeah, I want that. That’s why I came to Philly.”

He described the album as a meeting point between traditional Cuban music and hip-hop. Anga was the first conguero to play with turntables. “If you’re in Philly and you know the neo soul era, you’ll know why I love this album.”

That memory opened into something larger, a shared recognition in the room of a particular moment, a particular scene. The Black Lily. The energy of a city that felt, in that era, like the center of something.

“When it comes to our creative scene,” one voice offered, “those who know, we’re all still trying to create that same energy.”

Yannick, who was not in Philadelphia during those years but was in Brooklyn, close enough to feel it, put it plainly.

“Memory does a thing that not only increases the quality of a thing, but cements it in a way that becomes the standard of what is good. In that era, you couldn’t explain it to somebody. You just had to kind of be there. And the work that you do now is in response, or in remembrance, of that. It’s all connected.”

Where do you go when you need to reset?

Andres: Fairmount Park, off 41st and Girard, where he got married. And when pressed to go further: “My girls, my daughters, reset me. My wife resets me. When we’re the four of us together, there’s no better feeling.”

Taj: Home. His partner has made it feel like a real place, half the furniture built by hand. But he also named somewhere else, an abandoned underground pool at what was UArts, before the institution closed. Artists would install work down there. You could just be still.

“I used to lie down there next to the pool, this emptied-out hollow pool. And a couple of times, I definitely fell asleep down there. It was probably not great, but it was so cool. And every time you went down there, there was a chance that an artist had installed something new to look at.”

Yannick: Home, with some resistance to the word.

“I try to make sure home is like a state of mind type of thing, in my body most of the time, if I can be comfortable. I can reset anywhere.”

This is where we begin. With three artists who are, each in their own way, already paying attention. To memory. To the community. To the people around them. To the act of witnessing and being witnessed. 

Between now and then, we will be going deeper into the work, the process, and what it means to make something in front of an audience.

Read what comes next: Week 2, How the Work is Made.

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