This sculpture represents a blue interpretation of a pothos plant, emerging from a beer can atop two plywood cinder blocks. It is a literal cry for help, the vine spells the word.
Like most people, the spread of Covid 19 forced me into retreat. I am still confronted by cancelled exhibitions, wedding plans, and residencies. My jobs as an adjunct professor are threatened by plummeting enrollment, overall instability, and uncertainty.
At the peak of the Covid crisis in March and April, making artwork seemed petty in relationship to the literal life and death struggle into which we were suddenly plunged. I stopped making artwork for a few months, unable find inspiration or a greater humanitarian purpose in my art practice. Why is art important during a pandemic?
As quarantine wore on, I began to find inspiration in my home and in tropes of suburban life. I felt such gratitude for my safe home, my thriving houseplants, the companionship of my pets and my partner. During the Spring it was difficult to get the supplies that I needed to make the sculptural work I had planned, but I stumbled across a recipe for paper mache clay that has inspired a current body of sculptural work, a series of reinterpreted houseplants.
Through the creation of this series I've found an answer to the question that stumped me back in March - it's important to make art in a crisis as a means of documentation. Not so much as a documentation of events as a record of the feelings and emotional tenor of the time. The art made during this time is a collective vision, a group memory, and as such serves as a physical representation of a greater emotional resonance.