Listening to Ella Fitzgerald while Grandma taught me how to sew button eyes on dolls. Crudely cutting out pictures of Zac Efron to paste onto dinosaur torsos. Art, craft, literature, and music have always been a present in my life from childhood. Even if I couldn’t put a finger on why I liked a certain song or painting, I knew that it had an impact on me. For a long time, I accepted the mystery of art but like any eager person in her 20s I wanted to know more. I dedicated my college classes more and more to Art History courses until I committed myself to the major and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in the field from Columbia College of Chicago in 2022.

Creases are found all around us, in the wrinkled faces of wise individuals, in hard-worked hands, and in the dog ears of our books; They are documents of where we’ve been. Creases archive impact and experience. The title we have chosen resonates with me personally because it encapsulates my goals with this magazine.

I intend to hold space for topics such as contemporary art, socially engaged art, music, and creative writing and more that demonstrate impact in the realms of arts and culture. CREASED is a platform that celebrates creativity in all forms and interrogates the status quo. With the work that we are doing, we hope you take away new perspectives and inspiration.

-Giselle Torres

Bonus questions!

1. What’s your favorite smell and why?

My favorite smell is freshly baked bread from D'Amato's bakery in Chicago. I have many memories here as a child so the scent itself is extremely nostalgic for me.

2. What’s one piece of advice someone has given you that you’ve found to be true?

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”

In August 2018, a friend of mine donned me a copy of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. It’s a book I fell into, at once engulfed and coated by Nelson’s persuasive pool of confessions and her weaving of the theoretical and the visceral. Every once in a while I return to Bluets to dip my toes into her water and remember what it feels like to be deeply wrapped in someone else's fragmented fabric of memory and the dueling desire to recall and forget.

It’s a nimble book whose modest size betrays the vast waters that seem ready to gush out. Over the years, the soft spine has creased, and the cover scratched, traces of the changing hands held by the people I’ve lent it to in hopes that they too will slip into the blue pool of Nelson’s writing, caught by the currents of her tactile poetics.

Sitting in Frances's car while cruising south down on Chicago’s LSD, running late to our friend’s opening, we were pondering names and Creased stuck. It functions as a kind of index, the aftermath of an impact, yet it is also a word that indicates tactility and touch. It is a transformation, a wounding, and gestures embodied. Creases are physical memories and material manifestations of the passage of time itself. The word’s tactility felt fitting, for we wanted to write about the things that touch us, that shape us, the things that stay with us like a taste you can feel on your tongue long after it’s gone, or the sudden nostalgia for the scent of a certain place even though you can’t remember what it looks like.

To observe, experience and exist attentively to the environment around us can bring a wide range of emotions, from pain and exhaustion to joy and fulfillment. Yet, as Nelson asserts, ”That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst. Choiceless.”

   -Rebecka Öhrström Kann


What’s your favorite smell and why?
The smell of the staircase in my parent's apartment complex. It’s a very compelling mix of musty basement and laundry powder that reminds me that I’m almost home.