What Just Happened
During what felt like the depths of the pandemic – when everything in Chicago was dark, cold, and snowy – I decided to try and capture it. It was mostly for my own sanity. My life, like many others, had become monotonous. Each day I did the same things, saw the same group of people, and inhabited the same spaces. For months on end. Everyone aside from a few family members and friends seemed to evaporate into an idea of a person only to be seen digitally or in my mind’s eye.
As we began to feel invisible to each other, and sometimes even ourselves, those who had society’s cards stacked against them became increasingly visible in our collective social conscious. We were faced with death and illness in a way our culture had previously allowed us to explain away. And while we were hoping everyone stayed safe, we witnessed the state continue to murder people of color, with an awareness that these deaths were entirely preventable in contrast to Covid. I, along with many white people, took the time to see what was happening and listen to those who have been speaking the truth since long before we were born. We started to do the work to make our communities more just.
We also watched our systems, which were not designed to handle such synchronized activity, become strained but ultimately hold. Many of us saw all this without being able to discuss what was happening as we normally would have through daily activities such as going to the office or meeting friends. Instead, information and reactions came digitally through articles, chats, or scheduled video meet-ups, making everything feel a bit unreal.
Captured on plexiglass, a material found in any space essential enough to stay open, figures based on protesters vanish and reappear into each other as if they are figments of the imagination. Sometimes a shadowy outline of a nearby figure is reflected and other times it disappears into incomprehensible lines. Behind these standing figures are portraits of close friends and family and animated scenes of life in isolation. An interactive video allows you to step back into a version of lockdown when there was a never-ending stack of dishes, baking bread was a way to stay sane, and workout classes happened via Zoom.
