In September 2024, artists Miguel de Laveaga, Naava Guaraca, and Taylor Stout spent a weekend together at a defunct grist mill in the Hudson Valley. The once abandoned structure now serves as a functioning art studio owned by artist Laura Lee Ross. In advance of their upcoming group show The Mill, opening on April 17th at All Street Gallery, which showcases works created during this weekend, Basta spoke to the artists to learn more about their work, the show and this unique experience at The Mill.

Basta: I am drawn to the intimacy of the setting and would love to hear more about your experiences with one another. Did you know one another before attending, and did you directly collaborate on any works together, or was it more of an exchange of ideas? Have you engaged in this kind of close artmaking before?

Taylor: I love Naava and Miguel. For me, this project was so shaped by the fact that it was something I was doing alongside two dear friends. In addition to making art, we were also simply spending time together—sharing meals in Laura Lee’s kitchen, driving around, going out for ice cream at night. We’ve collaborated creatively before on COPY, an arts publication we all helped launch, but I think this project was a new level for the three of us. That said, it just felt so natural. 


Naava: Taylor has edited my writing for COPY a bunch of times, so I had a pretty good sense of how she works as an editor, but I also knew she made photographs and really cared about that side of her creative life. Miguel and I have painted together a lot over the past few years; painting can feel isolating, but I always love sitting with someone else while we paint together. Miguel and I also made a live-music video series called Potluck in 2022. We all have similar tastes in music, books, and art. Like Taylor said, it felt really natural.



Basta: The mill’s location in the Hudson Valley brought you together in a unique, extremely rich natural and historical setting. Could you share more about the historical context of the mill? It seems as though it has a rich, complex history tied to not only industry and commerce, but also colonization. How do you engage with this legacy and do you view your works as acts of resistance? Did you do research on the setting or was it more centered on your experiences with the space over the course of the weekend?

Taylor: The Mill was first built in the 1600s during a time of colonization in Upstate New York, when Dutch settlers took large swaths of land from the Indigenous people who had been occupying it for thousands of years. The nearby town of Schodack was the location of the Mahicans’ council fire. One of the things that first piqued my interest after Miguel proposed this project to me was the way that the Dutch’s taking ownership of the land still lingers in place names that survive today—like Rensselaer County for example, with the Rensselaers being the Mill’s former owners. It reminded me of my home state of California, where many places have Spanish names because that’s who was conquering that land around the same time. 

I ended up reading a book called Names on the Land by George R. Stewart that aims to tell the story of place-naming in America and how it reflects power, cultural values, and even oral tradition—it’s imperfect, of course, but interesting. Looking at maps of Upstate New York and surrounding areas, I noticed waterways with names like Murderkill and Murderer’s Creek. Stewart writes that one of these got its name after settlers were sailing down it and “drinking and debauching with the Indians until they were at last‬ barbarously murdered, and so that place was christened with their blood and to this day is called the‬ Murderer-Kill, that is, Murderers Creek”—though others dispute this lore, suggesting the name is simply derived from Middle Dutch, with moeder meaning “mother” and kille meaning “creek.” There’s this dangerous perception in America that the violent ways this country came into being are behind us in the distant past, but they persist in so many ways all around us, even energetically. 

Through my work at the Mill, I wanted to devote attention to these deceptively innocuous things about the site, like the names of rivers or roads, that can hold so much conflict and history when we dig into them. It’s just one part of an attempt to resist the erasure that happens so often all around us, that severs us from the land we live on. I hope it can encourage others to look at the spaces around them with a similar curiosity. 


Basta: What was it about the natural environment that inspired you, and how did it influence the work you created? 

Naava: We did our residency at Laura Lee’s studio at the Mill in September, when the seasons were just beginning to change. The first red and orange leaves were everywhere. We were all very committed to spending most of our time at the Mill outside: we sat by the creek, climbed up some of the falls, trekked through brush and thorny plants to get new vantage points, picked weeds and flowers to press and make prints, and just laid around on the grass. Laura Lee and her friend Charles have done a lot of work to keep the Mill’s natural spaces accessible, which is not something we all know much about from a landscaping perspective. So we were interacting with this space that’s both inherently natural and also preserved by humans.

We all worked with plein air methods—Taylor writing, Miguel and I painting—which forces a real letting go of assumptions. You have to just sit, and be, and look. Nature always provides, but it also doesn’t care about humans. So there’s a humility that I think we started to feel when we were hiking through the woods and kept getting pricked by thorns, or painting and then the light shifted and suddenly the image in front of us was completely different. Behind the building is the Muitzeskill (pronounced ‘Mitches-kill’), which used to power the Mill through hydropower. Now, it just runs to the Hudson, but the tide moves in and out over the course of a day very intensely. There was a lot of wild milkweed everywhere, which caught my eye. Nature just offered us a lot of details to sit with and notice. We kept coming back to the Simone Weil quote: “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” All the work we’ve made is a result of that attention. There’s a stillness I hope we were able to capture.

Basta: How did this weekend experience shape your work upon returning to NYC - have you continued to draw from memories and photographs, as well as working alongside one another?

Taylor: I realized this was the first time I’d devoted significant resources to my visual art practice in so long — and it was working collaboratively that helped give me the courage to take it seriously in that way again. Once I was back in the city, I got my film photographs developed and printed and framed a few for the show. I also edited my short story and sort of reckoned with what I had made while in this very raw and unguarded emotional state, and then made a book by hand to contain it. Physical presentation was a whole other stage of the process that I hadn’t engaged with in years because it can get really expensive and take up a lot of space that I simply don’t have in my apartment. Researching different papers, transporting my prints across the city in a portfolio, adhering them to mats - it all felt like muscle memory because it reminded me of being a teenager in photography classes. Every step felt like a whole world I could fall into. I had a couple dreams of picture frames. 

Beyond this more practical side, my fascination with the Mill has remained. I keep finding new sources to explore and learning more facets of Laura Lee’s history with the structure, how she’s cultivated it into the space of artistic production it is today. It was in foreclosure before she purchased it, so I don’t think it would still be standing without her. It’s inspiring to think about as I try to foster creative spaces and maintain archives in my own life. This project gave me a new lens through which to look at my surroundings. 


Naava: We all kind of inherently tend toward archiving our own lives, especially when it comes to taking photos and saving ephemera. Sometimes there’s a feeling when you set out to have an experience that you haven’t properly captured it for future nostalgia. But I didn’t feel that way about this time at all—it just felt like we were at work for four days. Upon returning, we all had a plethora of objects already made, and then it was just a question of how do we want to flesh out this body of work to really round out the archival nature of the project. I made three new paintings in my studio between October 2024 and April 2025, all based on photos I’d taken at the Mill. Once we’d finished most of the work, we gathered at my studio to plan out the physical curation of the show, where everything was going on the walls. Then we put together the process zine. 

It was really empowering to put together our own art-making residency experience, without any kind of support or approval from governing bodies or institutions. It’s a really wonderful reminder that if you want to make art with your friends, you can and you should. 



Basta: Taylor, you grew up in a beach town outside of LA. How did this early experience being immersed by nature influence your creativity and how has it evolved moving to more urban locations like Brooklyn, where nature is less accessible? Did your weekend experience at the mill bring you back to any childhood memories?

Taylor: Growing up in a beach town introduced me early to the immensity of nature. I saw the Pacific Ocean pretty much every day, and it never became a mundane sight—it’s baffling every time, how expansive it is. When I was little, I loved the beach yet had this intense fear of tsunamis. I was always having nightmares where waves crashed into my room or dragged all my belongings out to sea. So I’ve always had a simultaneous enchantment with and fear of nature, and the fear is really a deep respect of its power—like the way that being “God-fearing” means you have a deep respect for God. I don’t participate much in organized religion these days, but nature feels sacred to me, and I can also catch a glimpse of that oceanic feeling when I make and absorb art. 

Living in New York City, I’ve always gone to water—including the same Hudson River that flows past the Mill—when I need to clear my head. The briny smell of waterfronts comforts me. It’s hard to always hold onto groundedness when I’m in the city’s chaos, but I know that nature and the city are not really the separate things we make them out to be. Nature is in me and is all around me, including the rats, the pigeons, and the weeds springing out of all those forgotten construction sites I walk past every day. There’s a strange resilience there that is affecting in its own way. 

Being at the Mill, it was a different ecosystem from the ones I spent my childhood in—much more lush and humid. But it felt so alive at the end of September that it still made me nostalgic, maybe even for invented memories. The way I interacted with the land around the Mill is probably what reminded me of my own childhood the most. I spent a lot of time trying to be low to the ground, paying attention to small details, touching the plants and the dirt. All the while, my skin smelled like sunscreen and citrusy mosquito repellent.  

Basta: I am fascinated by your exploration of hand-me-down myths. I'm curious to hear what led you toward this and where you draw these myths from. Considering the oral tradition of passing down myths, is this something you focus on, or do you also engage with visual representations of myths? Are you working to challenge them and reinterpret them in more contemporary contexts or embrace them, perhaps focusing more on the social aspect of myths? 

Taylor: I think it has to do with being an American and the simultaneous disgust and love I feel for this place. As we grow up, we absorb so many stories about what came before us both in the familial and cultural scopes. It’s the social act of sharing and passing down these stories that fascinates me the most. I’m interested in the way a story can act as a tether between individuals. With “hand-me-down myths,” I refer less to dominant narratives like Westerns, though these things do play a role, and more to the folk or vernacular mythologies that are born outside of mainstream cultural power. My female relatives a couple generations back include a feminist Catholic nun in Los Angeles and an Appalachian Wiccan, so there’s an awesome blending that happens when I see myself as a sort of shared vessel for these distinct stories—and this isn’t unique to me at all, but integral to existing in a fractured place like America. It’s how I’ve realized as I’ve come of age that there are a lot more traditions and experiences that have to do with me than I once believed, and that has been a really powerful and grounding experience. 



Basta: At the mill you wrote a short story that seems to have a sensory focus of your surroundings. Could you share more about the piece and the process of writing it?

Taylor: I have to start by saying I finished reading Stephen King’s book It the night before we went to the Mill. It is over a thousand pages long, so I had spent the prior months reading it alongside doing my Mill research, immersed in this atmosphere of a haunted childhood summer in a post-industrial Maine town. I didn’t make this pairing intentionally, but it felt so rich. 

I often write things set in California because that’s the landscape I know most intimately, so I wanted to use my time at the Mill to push myself out of that box, to attune myself to the sensations of a different landscape. Because of my fixation on It, I knew I wanted to use horror conventions to tell a story about childhood, how children are often dealing with these terrible things that they don’t have language for and inventing “monsters” to face them—and of course, how friendship acts as a salve for this. I wrote the whole thing in order, by hand. I didn’t know exactly where I was going as I wrote it. I incorporated sounds—like crickets or freight train horns—into the narrative as I heard them around me. I felt that my relative newness to the environment could act as a return to a more childlike perspective, where there is so much unknown and therefore so much potential for both fear and wonder.

Basta: Naava, I am interested to hear more about your use of cyanotype printmaking as this process, capturing light to create almost ghostly traces, seems to strongly relate to your exploration of memory and nostalgia. What draws you to this specific type of printmaking? Did your work at the mill incorporating found materials differ greatly from your former practice?

Naava: I’m glad to hear you call them “ghostly” because ghosts are something I’m drawn to in general. I’ve always believed in spirits, and I’m obsessed with liminal spaces where “the veil feels thin,” as witchcraft practitioners say about supernatural portals. I felt a thinning at the Mill. While a lot of my work is about the relationship between light and space, and how light lends itself to the impermanence of memory, painting and drawing both feel more reflective, impressionistic. Cyanotype printmaking is centered on light in its most literal form. It’s scientific, it's archival. I’ve always been a printmaker because I’m very process-oriented, and I like the structure of having to follow steps to create a piece of work. It’s how I paint, too. The cyanotype process leaves a little bit of room for experimentation, but not too much—when I was gathering the milkweed tufts for that one piece, I only had about 30 seconds to arrange the material before the printing process was in full effect, and I had to relinquish some element of control. 

These are the first prints I’ve made since graduating from art school four years ago. Not to talk about COVID, but I first came to cyanotypes when my schooling went online in 2020 and I found myself without access to printmaking equipment whilst enrolled in printmaking classes. I had to turn from making 15-layer silkscreen prints and etchings to alternative processes, and so I started making cyanotypes. I came back to them in the context of this project because the Mill has very little within it by way of modern technology, and I was able to make these prints using water from the Muitzeskill to wash them out after exposing them. Laura Lee also uses the stream water when making her watercolors. It's an integral part of her process, so it was cool to get to follow in her footsteps. 

 


Basta: Miguel, I am curious to hear more about your documentary filmmaking in conversation with your painting practice. Does your documentary approach to filmmaking influence your painting or do you consider these practices more separate?

Miguel: In high school, I got obsessed with vlogs, and after trying my hand at being a YouTuber myself, I went to college to make a formal career out of movie making. I became obsessed with slow-paced, slice-of-life movies that demand attention from a viewer and leave you with more questions than answers when things are said and done. I began to see the world in frames that tell a story without a formal narrator, talking heads, or even dialogue. 

For The Mill, these works began as several photos saved in a folder on my phone, evolved into a group research project about a site and became several artists’ visions of a place, in real time. There is so much more than what we’ve told through this iteration of the show; it is ongoing and communal. Whether making a film or painting, “my work is never entirely mine; it’s shaped by those who have faith in it and those who interpret it, people who help carry it forward.” - Fabian Saul



Basta: I am also interested in your exploration of space in relation to a documentary approach and how you balance the personal with the historical? With much of your work focused on fleeting or deteriorating spaces, do you feel an urgency to capture something before it is lost or is it more about honoring the spaces, documenting this entropic process?

Miguel: My relationship with Laura Lee is one borne of curiosity. I first stayed with her years ago without any connection other than a room for rent listing. Over the years I’ve gotten to know her and the world; secrets of feng shui and alternative healing modalities, how she fought her New York City landlord for money that she used to buy the Mill, and what it looks like to share friendship with someone of another generation. My work is personal in that I’m the one looking around, talking to a stranger on the side of the road while I paint or clocking what time the creek is at low and high tide. 

Our time on earth is short and I’m archiving layers of reality. However, what we see in front of us and what’s in our history books is only the tip of the iceberg. There is an urgency to my work, and it’s difficult not to consider the potential of loss. But loss is too concrete a term for me, and doesn’t acknowledge the vast network of lived experience across time and space. There is only so much I am aware of, and when I immerse myself in a space of unknowing, the murmurs of the unheard grow. These are the signs of entropy that I’m zooming in on in my work.

Naava: I’m not the biggest fan of painting en plein air, but Miguel loves it, and I think he’s so good at it. I wanted to see how it could affect me, too. I ended up with one painting I really love, and one I don’t love so much (I won’t tell which is which), but I think that’s the beauty of it. Sometimes it feels really good to just make a painting that accomplishes what you set out to accomplish, and leave it at that. There’s also a sense of fantasy you have to lean into when plein air painting, because the light changes so much and nature is fickle. I love that space where reality starts slipping into fiction.

Basta: Could you also share more about the upcoming show at All Street Gallery and your relationship to this community grounded in social engagement and community empowerment?

Taylor: The COPY-All Street connection first began when a member of their collective, Ciaran Short, wrote an article for our site about a year ago. I edited it and was impressed by the way that his writing balanced warm humor and cutting observations. All Street reflects that in the way it champions emerging artists and emphasizes community rather than recreating the cloistered and exclusionary space that so many galleries are. So when we started discussing where we’d want to potentially have this gallery show, it was always at All Street in my mind. I’m so thankful that this is the space to present these works.  

Naava: We <3 All Street Gallery. I first became aware of the space when Eden Chinn, one of the founders, reached out to COPY for press coverage of a show. The COPY ethos of creating space for emerging artists aligns with All Street’s mission really nicely. I visited the gallery’s Third Street location for their show Reminders of Existence, and Eden and a couple of the other curators walked me through it and we discussed it critically. What I love most about All Street is their commitment to New York City. Eden and the other founders grew up here—I grew up here, too—and they’re really interested in work that continues the conversation of what it means to be a person living in New York at this time. That, combined with the social engagement aspects of the Mill and all its history, really cemented that they were the perfect venue for this show. We’re so glad to work with them. 



Basta: The free zine workshop accompanying the show is a really unique way to include and engage visitors. I would love to hear more about what drew you specifically to the zine medium and whether social, community engagement is something integral to your practices?

Naava: I love zines! I love print media in general, but I’ve been buying zines since I was a teenager. Before we spent our residency period at Laura Lee’s studio, we did a ton of research into the history of the area, and into other representations of the themes we were thinking about. We ended up with a huge shared Google Drive folder of photos and notes that had helped us both prepare for and reflect on the project. It felt only right that we find a proper home for all of it, and we began throwing around the idea of a “process zine.” I’m really into simple black-and-white design, and ended up laying out our photos, graphic elements, and historical text to create Millwork, the zine that accompanies the show.


This project has found its way into the world through social engagement—our relationships with one another, and with Laura Lee. I really want this show to feel accessible to others, especially in a way that empowers folks to conduct similar documentation of their own spaces. As technology ramps up, I think analog media is more important than ever. You can’t store a painting in the “cloud,” thank god. All our research was made possible by people who chose to physically document their lives. I’m also currently working at a youth-led climate justice non-profit, where I help program art-making activities into their events and community gatherings. Providing space for folks to make low-pressure art is essential in this day and age, and reminds people whose priorities are elsewhere — politics, business, school — that they’re capable of making art without needing to identify as an “artist.” At the workshop, everyone will get a blank, six-page mini-zine folded into existence from a normal 8.5 x 11 inch piece of printer paper. We’ll all get to spend time together looking through collage materials and seeing what already exists in the world that inspires us — just like we did when we started investigating the Mill.



Basta: Do you have any plans to return to the mill to create works or perhaps work in similar residencies?

Taylor: The Mill gave me new faith in going out of the usual spaces of my daily life to make art, so hopefully another DIY residency of sorts is in my future. I always want to produce work that engages with the world around me rather than attempting an escape from it—so I told myself this meant being inspired by an environment of constraints, doing things like writing on my phone while on the subway or taking photos on my lunch break, almost sneaking art-making into this capitalist machine. While there’s some validity to this, I wonder how much of it was simply a fear of more fully devoting myself to creativity, as Laura Lee has done in her stewarding of the Mill. I’m thinking more critically now about the constraints that capitalism places on artistic production and how it felt to take time off from my 9-5 office job to do work that mattered to me, to sit with nature and be present, to use my body. I’m considering what’s possible, what’s valuable to me, and what I want to spend my life cultivating.


Naava: I hope we’ll always come back to the Mill as long as Laura Lee is working there, especially to visit her and see what she’s making; the studio is such a vibrant space that really emphasizes who she is. Other than that, I’m heading back up to the Hudson Valley towards the end of this year to take part in a different residency program for a longer time span. I feel really inspired by all the work we did to bring this project to life — from research, to production, to reflection—and hope to keep making work in project-based ways. I think a sense of specific direction is something my practice has been lacking for the past few years. So I’m excited to see what other parts of the world will open themselves up to me for investigation.


Miguel: Capturing a space with friends like this has really stuck with me. Coming back to the city after our dedicated time Upstate has me thinking about the rest of my life, and what a career as an artist in constant collaboration looks like. It has been such a treat to share my friendship with Laura Lee with Taylor and Naava, and I can’t wait for her to meet other artist friends at our opening. The Mill has stuck with us since making this work, and I’m curious how re-entry into that space in the future will feel as we keep growing. Until then, I am seeing light, industry, decay, and traces of human touch at every turn.


About the Show:(Courtesy of All Street Gallery) 

All Street Gallery is pleased to announce “The Mill”, an exhibition by Miguel de
Laveaga, Naava Guaraca, Laura Lee Ross, and Taylor Stout, on view at 119 Hester Street from April 17 -
27, 2025. The exhibition will be accompanied by an opening reception on Thursday, April 17, from 6 - 9
pm, and an artist-led zine workshop on Saturday, April 26, from 1 - 3 pm. Both events are free and open
to the public, and RSVP is not required.

In September 2024, de Laveaga, Guaraca, and Stout spent a weekend making artwork together at a
defunct grist mill in the Hudson Valley, immersing themselves in the Mill’s current mode of
production—that of a functioning art studio, belonging to artist Laura Lee Ross. The resulting output
consists of oil paintings, film photographs, cyanotypes, and print publications. The Mill marks the first
public showing of these artworks and the artists’ first collaboration with All Street Gallery.

The Mill sits on Muitzeskill Road just after its intersection with Route 9J, which runs along the Hudson
River. This placement reflects an era when waterways were channels of colonization, industry, and
commerce. The structure was built during the 1640s and functioned as a grist mill until the mid-1900s.
Twenty years ago, Ross purchased the property and turned it into her art studio, introducing a new kind of
“making” to the storied space. In 2024, it was purchased from Ross by the owner of the surrounding acres
under the agreement that she could continue to occupy it for the next twenty years. Due to their fascination with lineage, time, ecology, and Americana, the three artists felt drawn to the potential energy of the Mill. While mills were once ubiquitous across America, this site felt anything but mundane—with 19th-century historian Nathaniel Bartlett Sylvester describing the Hudson Valley as having “its present outlines in some tremendous convulsion of nature.” Engaging with such complex history and landscape led the artists to ask increasingly difficult questions: How do we create in a way
that respects what came before us? What and who are we working in service of?

Blending the artists’ research and their embodied experiences, The Mill tethers past and present: power
lines slice through forested landscapes, and signs of wear lend human-made structures the patina of
history, suggesting at once an idyllic myth and a fraught reality. While the 19th-century landscape painters
of the region’s Hudson River School once portrayed a glorified interrelation between colonial settlement
and nature, the artists at the Mill instead seek to explore the deep tensions arising from this relationship.
Their plein air approaches—seen in de Laveaga’s oil paintings completed during single outdoor sittings,
Guaraca’s cyanotypes made with found materials and sunlight, and Stout’s short story incorporating the
sights and sounds that existed around her as she wrote—pick up this artistic precedent while allowing for
a degree of immersion that attunes them to the site’s complexity. The Mill’s fading and forgotten histories
begin to make themselves quietly manifest in the atmosphere itself.

By devoting attention to the living environment through their creative practices, the artists work towards a
future honoring all the land can hold. As Ross has said, “It is all about bringing attention to wounds and
giving tribute to survival.”

A process documentation zine made by the artists, entitled Millwork, will be released in conjunction with
the opening, available to read and purchase at the gallery.


About the Artists: 

Miguel de Laveaga is an artist based in New York City, born and raised in Berkeley. He earned his BFA in Film & TV from New York University, specializing in documentary filmmaking. His painting practice reflects the urge to record the decaying spaces and untold stories around and in front of him. His writing is published in COPY, and he works out of his studio in Queens.

Naava Guaraca is an artist and writer from New York City, where she still lives. She received her BFA in Studio Art from New York University and has exhibited at 80WSE Gallery and EV Gallery. She curates an online micro-site of new visual artwork for COPY. Her paintings and prints explore the relationship between nostalgia and place, archiving the mundane for perpetual reflection.

Taylor Stout is a writer, artist, and editor living in Brooklyn. She grew up in a beach town on the edge of Los Angeles. Her work explores hand-me-down myths and the confluence of cultural and personal memory. She serves as the Head of Editorial at COPY, an independent arts publication and community, and her writing has also been published by Public Seminar, Currant Jam, and Crybaby Zine, among others. She earned her BS in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.

Laura Lee Ross is an artist, environmentalist, and feng shui practitioner. Her work involves creating
functional, inspiring spaces as well as the art that gives them even greater dimension. She attended Bard
College in the 1970s and lives in the Hudson Valley on the banks of the Hudson River. She’s worked out
of the Mill since 2007.


About All Street NYC:

Founded in 2018, All Street Gallery presents works by emerging and underrepresented artists whose works demonstrate social engagement and community empowerment. First established as an artist collective and grassroots protest organization by born and raised New Yorkers, All Street Gallery is a space that is both created by and for artists. Having deep roots in New York City, the gallery and collective share a background in public art and activations as a means of creative protest and resistance. Such socially engaged work has carried into their gallery space as they opened their doors on 77 East Third Street, and as they now open their second location at 119 Hester Street.

Website: www.allstnyc.com
Instagram: @all.st.nyc