Atiba Jefferson:
I would say the reason why I make things work is because I grew up really poor. I started work age 12 as a busboy. Skateboarding is all about failure and figuring it out. That work ethic is built in, if you want something, you’ve got to work for it. Growing up with a single mom and three kids wasn’t easy. But that survival mode shaped who I am.

When I found something I loved and started working in a skate shop instead of bussing tables, it hit me: Find what you like, and you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s true.

AJ:
Both. Skating was a huge escape from being poor and everything else. But it was also a community where none of that mattered. I wasn’t trying to escape home, my mom was just busy working, but I found people who were like-minded and into the same things I was. That’s what I loved.

AJ:
There’s a difference when the person shooting is also a skater. I know the tricks, I study the magazines and videos, and that gives me a different view. I can say, “You’re leaning back too much, lean a little forward,” because I know what it takes to do it. That perspective gives my photography a different kind of passion. There’s no right or wrong way, it’s just a different way.

AJ:
There’s a big difference. I was not a great filmer. Filmers have one chance, they can’t mess up. With photography, especially back in the film days, you never knew what you had until you developed it. That was stressful. Now, with digital, you can check the back of your camera and know immediately you got it.

AJ:
The first time I wasn’t living check to check, that was it. Working for Transworld gave me that.

There are so many big moments: the Tony Hawk bullring photo, Tyshawn’s kickflip over the subway, Andrew Reynolds’ frontside flip with all the kids watching, Chris Joslin’s 360 flip down El Toro. But the thing about skateboarding is progression—tricks that once felt massive become ordinary later. Still, Tyshawn’s kickflip is timeless.

AJ:
That was one of my proudest moments. The timing was right, and Thrasher gave me the freedom to shape the issue. We also made a film for ESPN called Monochrome, which focuses on the Black experience in skateboarding. I wanted to do that back in ’96, the story is much longer now, but I’m proud to have been part of it.

AJ:
Skateboarding has always been inclusive. I’ve never experienced racism within skateboarding, only outside of it.

Today, we’re seeing the culture fully embrace everyone: women, transgender skaters, people of color. It’s always been a safe space, and that’s why I love it so much.

AJ:
Skateboarding is my identity. It’s not just community, it’s the boards, the artwork, the magazines, the videos, the music. It’s my everything.

When people wear my work or Haze’s artwork, I hope they feel that vibe. It’s a huge honor to be a photographer within skateboarding. It’s not like being a pro skater, but it’s still an incredible privilege.

OONA: Self-sovereignty.
Which is just a fancy way of expressing the idea that I am in charge of my body, my money, my creativity, and my life. It’s a radical approach to the self – taking complete ownership of every aspect of my identity and way of being.

OONA: Sometimes, I consider myself a feminist artist and an activist. I’m also an anonymous artist, a performance artist, and a crypto artist. Depending on the day, I am either a brilliant artist or a very bad one. Sometimes, I perform; most times, those performances engage with technology, and almost always, they explore identity.
The activist question is tricky. When I think of contemporary activism, two archetypes come to mind: one I admire, the other less so. There’s the Emma Sulkowicz type: she carried her mattress, the site of her rape, across her college campus until graduation. Then there are the oil-painting destroyers: once provocative, now repetitive and headline-chasing. I’d be disappointed to be lumped in with the latter but proud to create work with strong intent and lasting impact like the former.
In this lifetime, I happen to inhabit a female body, and I’m asking what it means to exist – as a woman who makes art. Feminism is one of the tools I use to navigate the weight, wonder, and weirdness of that experience. How do I translate the view from my eyes, my breasts, my body into art? If my pussy could talk, what would she like to say?
Feminism is not about gatekeeping womanhood, nor is it man-hating. Feminism is a collection of ideas, like seeds, that, if nurtured, give way to greater intuition and freedom of choice.

OONA: Labels, when applied to artists, should be used as launching pads, not intellectual cages.
If someone writes off my work as “feminist” and moves on, that is their loss. I’m not here to coddle small minds or peens. In my pursuit of knowledge and in my expression of wisdom through art, feminism is a great starting point, but feminism is certainly far from the final destination.

OONA: I never show my face, but my body is often on display. Without my face, my body becomes more like a canvas – a (literal and physical) abstraction to explore the female form.
I used to have silicone breast implants; I explanted them. Now, in a performance called Look Touch Own, I invite people, one by one, to touch my breasts and the implants that were once inside me. The tension between anonymity and intimacy is intense. I’m letting strangers touch my scars, but they can’t see my face. It’s privacy vs. intimacy, honesty vs. visibility.
Anonymity serves as armor in my guerrilla performances. I’ve been kicked out of Art Basel Miami, the MoMA, and the Met for these performances. When Sotheby’s curated an all-male glitch art show – a movement founded by a trans woman in the 1970s – I publicly called them out until they re-curated the show. In these instances, the anonymity my mask provides is a signal of something renegade, something radical enough to warrant invisibility. The idea is bigger than the individual.

Plus, the mask means I don’t really have to fuss with makeup.

OONA: My anonymity is whatever the audience projects onto it; it shifts from person to person.
Without a face, some people treat me like a toy or an object of desire. During Look Touch Own in Los Angeles, a woman messaged me for days afterward, begging for forgiveness because she “treated me like a plaything and didn’t know why.” (She did indeed treat me like a plaything; she is one of the few women who juggled my implants and tried to juggle my real breasts as well.)
When I’m in wealthier crowds, people sometimes assume I’m an escort, and I can always tell. Once, I was at a small event presenting Touched, a dynamic artwork tracking G7 asylum trends using UNHCR data. At the start of the evening, a woman rudely dismissed me and even told her husband not to speak to me. (I can only assume it was because she knew he enjoys meeting escorts.) Then she heard me speak. Once she understood my anonymity and its purpose, we spent the rest of the night chatting. We got along super well. I love moments like that – when people show they can change their minds… emotional and creative flexibility in action.

My favorite reaction to my mask is, of course, curiosity. I meet so many beautifully curious people who talk about all types of wonderful ideas with OONA.

OONA: I’m not sure I could answer that, even if I wanted to. I don’t really want to “fight,” but that doesn’t mean I just want to make art about “pretty shapes.”
Anger + Love = Passion. Sadness + Love = Empathy. And laughter is supreme.
I’m creating art with all three: passion, empathy, and humor.
In performances like Look Touch Own, I’m performing along a sliding scale of anger and sadness… anger at how often women’s bodily boundaries are violated, and sadness at the harm women inflict on themselves in the name of beauty.
In other works, I like to be playful. In Spread, a video art collaboration with Lori Baldwin, I mapped out the gender pay gap in art sales using butter. Taking big, heavy topics and breaking them down into absurdity is its own form of resistance.

OONA: My work will live forever, and no one but me can tell me what to do! Conceptually, I’m deeply attracted to the potential of blockchain technology, crypto, and NFTs. I believe it offers a revolutionary approach to ownership. In its “purest” form, blockchain technology allows us to create entirely new metrics of value – ones that challenge traditional gatekeepers and hierarchies in the art world.
For performance art, an ephemeral (and esoteric) medium that resists objectification, blockchain opens up a lot of possibilities. It allows me to assign tangible value to intangible moments, preserving my performances in a way that transcends their original context. The sale or transaction is, in many ways, an extension of the performance.
It’s also empowering. I wouldn’t have a practice if I had to rely on the traditional art world hierarchy. I’m too wild for white walls. Blockchain redistributes power, allowing artists to connect directly with their audiences without intermediaries. I love that I know my collectors and the people who support my practice.

OONA: This technology is only as good as the people who use it. In other words, it does not live up to its potential.

Charlie Stein: I like the friction between the two titles. The Real Thing is taken from an obscure Australian pop song. Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is a corrupted Nintendo meme but functions as a reminder that nothing is permanent. I want audiences to sense both at once: the desire for authenticity and the awareness that it can slip away at any moment.

Both titles trace back to corporate language. The Real Thing first struck me in Australia through Russell Morris’s cult psychedelic track, written during the Vietnam War as a sly riff on Coca-Cola’s famous slogan. The song folds protest and romance into one, weaving in even jarring WWII samples, which makes it political, magical, enigmatic, and subversively romantic all at once.

Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost originated in ’90s pop culture, as a variation of the Nintendo quit screen. The original “Anything not saved…” was remixed through Reddit and meme culture into the more poetic, aphoristic phrase “Everything not saved will be lost”. I asked myself why this incorrect version became more widely shared than the original quit-screen message, and I think it’s because we feel a desperate need to find meaning in an increasingly technologized world. We want deeper meaning in the magical devices that surround and haunt us; otherwise, we have to accept that we are just nodes in a ginormous internet brain that spans the planet which we feed into—and which feeds off us.

CS: The imagery of puffer jackets in Virtually Yours grew out of a deeply personal experience: visiting my partner on what would become his death bed in the ICU, where every attempt at contact was mediated through protective layers of latex gloves and glossy clothing. Those barriers made touch at once tender and distant, and I began to see the padded surface as a kind of interface — protective yet suffocating, intimate yet estranging.

I don’t see Virtually Yours — or the “puffer jacket series,” as you called it — as only about personal experience, though this is present in the work. I began the series a year or two after my partner’s passing, and over time I’ve come to see that it resonates with many kinds of relationships I navigate — personal, professional, and even metaphysical.

CS: They do a couple of things I really appreciate. The figures are all Trojan horses: an actual person is never shown. They remain mysterious, even to me, because they are portraits that deflect their own readability. They refuse to be easily decoded through gender, race, or class. That ambiguity allows me to work in an investigative mode.

At the same time, these figures connect to how we experience bodies through screens today. Time and again, I paint glossy black surfaces that evoke a smartphone display—smooth, light-emitting, touch-sensitive. When you touch your phone, nothing really physical happens: a tiny electrical signal registers, is translated, and becomes an action. On canvas, I turn that into an image of dissolution: touch without object, intimacy between skin and surface. We stroke our phones thousands of times a day—far more than we touch our loved ones, or even ourselves. That strange redistribution of tenderness fascinates me.

So the figures hover in this in-between space: half-human, half-object, intimate yet untouchable. They mirror contemporary identity as something mediated, constantly translated through layers—of fabric, of screen, of code. But they also insist on mystery, on resisting total capture. For me, that’s the paradox of being alive right now: we are more visible than ever, yet our true presence still flickers between surfaces.

CS: That’s a good observation. I would argue that painting is still one of the most successful storage media for images that we have. We know how to preserve oil on canvas for centuries. Every major museum employs teams of conservators who specialize in stabilizing pigments, repairing canvases, and slowing down the aging of oil paint. Compare that with the fragility of digital images: formats become obsolete, hardware breaks, and even when stored carefully, files can vanish because the infrastructure that supports them collapses. Rhizome and similar organizations are working on digital preservation, but the knowledge of how to keep a JPG alive for the next half-millennium is far less secure than the knowledge of how to preserve an altarpiece from the fifteenth century.

Painting to me is not nostalgic at all, it’s radically contemporary. As a medium, it guarantees visibility and longevity in a way digital storage still struggles to achieve. Think of VHS tapes: they’ve degraded, the players have disappeared, and whole archives are lost. By comparison, a painting, even when cracked or darkened, remains legible, restorable, and transmissible across generations. So when I paint, I’m not just making an image; I’m choosing a medium that resists disappearance.

CS: Living in different countries has made me acutely aware of how identity is not fixed but constantly dissolving and reforming. You carry fragments of language, gesture, and intimacy from one place to the next, shedding and accumulating layers like skins. This fluidity is mirrored in my paintings, where figures often appear padded or encased, melting or half-dissolved, suspended between categories.

When I lived in Beijing, I became hyper-aware of my own body as a marker of difference. During my daily bus rides and errands I didn’t experience myself as different until I caught my reflection in the window and saw an alien staring back. Blond hair, pale eyes, light skin. That estrangement came with its own contradictions. There was comfort in difference, but also the undeniable recognition of privilege: I could drift through that space with a kind of immunity, while others – the larger part of the world population – carried the daily weight of structural racism. Whiteness represents only a minority of the global population; it is neither a norm nor a standard for others to live by. Becoming aware of one’s own privilege—and the traces of racism within one’s own thinking—is a necessary beginning. To inhabit that contradiction can be unsettling, but it matters. I feel this body of work largely takes skin colour out of the equation and allows me to speak to more universal topics that may be relevant to anyone at some stage.

CS: I don’t try to separate the personal from the universal. My paintings often begin from lived experience, but I treat those moments as material that can shift and expand into broader conditions. In the Virtually Yours series, for example, the padded and encased figures carry traces of grief and intimacy, yet they also speak to how all of us navigate mediation, distance, and vulnerability today. I think the balance lies in letting the work remain open: it is never only about me, and never only about the universal, but always suspended in between.

CS: Yes and No. In Berlin the puffer jacket is what the baseball cap is in America: a uniform, not a fetish. Everyone wears those big black glossy coats through the endless winters. Straps, latex, vinyl belong to the city too, but what stayed with me was the sheen itself, that glossy black that always recalls the surface of the iPhone — cold, omnipresent, the portal through which so much of life now passes.

Even if those cultural markers do not always translate, I try to make work that unfolds on multiple levels. At first glance you might see figures embracing or fighting, then notice textures, contrasts, titles, the meaning I try to inscribe into each canvas. I want to make works I could live with for the rest of my life. Paintings that contain something I cannot fully grasp, that will mean something different to me ten or fifteen years from now. Like the box the pilot draws for the Little Prince, they withhold clarity so the imagination can keep moving.

The objects I depict are vessels. I try not to seal them shut, so that I can always ask: if this painting were real in another realm, what would I encounter if I skinned these forms? That question keeps me excited and a little anxious, as if I am afraid to discover what they truly hold.

CS: That is a difficult question, because what I see right now is a strong current of nostalgia in art, and that troubles me. By nostalgia I mean the insistence that art must look handmade in order to be authentic, as if visible brushstrokes or artisanal labor were guarantees of value. It is a romantic idea, but one that reproduces a very narrow model: the solitary genius in the studio, detached from questions of economy, infrastructure, or technological change. Historically, this model has been available only to those with security and privilege. For everyone else — women, minorities, artists without resources — it becomes exclusion disguised as purity.

My own practice pushes against that. I want painting to remain a valid contemporary medium, not because of its nostalgic aura, but because of its unique capacity to store and transmit sensations across time. At the same time, I engage with writing, installation, and digital media, because these forms expand the conversation and allow new ways of thinking about intimacy, mediation, and presence.

CS: I would say both. Technology alienates and connects at the same time. There are sparks of intimacy when you catch a friend mid-meme in a chat, or when FaceTime makes it possible for my mother and me to sustain a close relationship across distance. At the same time, so much of life is outsourced to us as end-users — travel apps, booking systems, endless contracts — that our hours are consumed by tasks disguised as efficiency.

Philosophically, though, I think technology is not just a tool we use, but part of what defines us as a species. Aside from our ability to cry tears, the drive to invent and advance technologies is the one thing that sets us apart from other animals. It is both our curse and our gift: the source of alienation, but also of entirely new forms of intimacy worth embracing.