Post-Pandemic Experiments / Experimentos pospandémicos
For the last two decades I have made artwork about being away from home, somewhere far away, often somewhere new or unknown to me. “Public” was part of the requirement. It was never private, not even when it focused on my own experience.
The pandemic changed that by requiring work to focus on “place” in different ways. I had not yet explored “place” and “public” as concepts understood through the Internet and social media, and I had not recently examined my own immediate environment. The video "Learning to Love the Apocalypse Now" combines the representation of real domestic and physical environments with virtual spaces (footage stolen from social media): both real and vicarious participation in important events of the day, sometimes while trapped in the room or in between dog walks. The comfort of my daily existence is referenced and questioned in relation to police protests, pandemic anxiety, death, a kind of fear of the "public" and what happens there.
Expanding on the idea of quarantine/staying in place, I have gathered materials from my immediate surroundings: the basement, the garden, the studio and also the virtual. Very old artwork in my studio that seems to ask me when I will make new ones. There are Internet-based images of conflict and struggle from the comfort of the computer screen, a kind of archeology of home and not home: conflict and comfort in the American Midwest.
