ART FROM THE QUARANTINE | WEEK TWO | PORTRAITS IN ISOLATION
PATRICK CHURCH
AARON WILLIAMS
COLE WITTER
body-i
DAY 15
“Your mind tells you that if you do not think and do not worry, then your life is going to collapse. That is not true, it's a lie.”- Eckhart Tolle
For this video experiment, I screen recorded my friend Trevor Handsome moving in his room. We both are currently living in Brooklyn during the COVID-19 Quarantine.
body-i is a video exploring the relationship between our conscious and our shadow.
ANDREE LJUTICA
Present Absence: Portraits
To be present is to allow the weight of your experiences to fold into the unconscious assembly of thoughts, to not be enacted, but to rather be the essential composition of how one reacts to the immediate world. These experiences become the basis for our decision making, our reactions. Our past helps us feel with order and prevent each experience from becoming abundantly unmanageable.
But what is our ability to refer to other events such as this virus? We are all influenced by films and literature about the end of times and preparedness and by news and its obsession with high stakes scenarios and by war and our political reactions to it. But these aren't experiences. These are manufactured reference points that provide a dimly lit corridor to guide us. Quarantine, isolation, these are truly unique experiences for most, isolated within the events of a normal life. And so our subconscious array of reflexive experiences doesn't help us here. Instead, they fold into an absence which becomes more present than any memory or reference.
As advertisers pummel airwaves with boorish messages of “unity like never before,” I instead feel a distance. I don’t feel a sense of unity or virtual togetherness as others might. I feel the weight of isolation and the absence of the functioning world around me. Any contact I do feel and have made during this quarantine has been through a filter, both virtually, and through the filter of quarantine. In this way, I feel the extension of the partial connectedness culture which has been developing through technology's pervasiveness, more than ever before. This virus and our corresponding way of life within it feels to me a progression of the ways in which we have been existing since the turn of the technological era.
This series reveals through portraiture, self-portraiture and images of my surroundings, this sense of partial contact, embedded with the mood of absence for the real. It refers to the presence of the absence through partial portraits which render the subject, at an emotional distance from the viewer. From portraits through fogged or totally obscured glass, to a hand on a distended pregnant stomach, each image deals with presence in a unique way often with the subject somehow removed from the same field in which the image was captured.
ELVIS MAYNARD
CRUST
I’m here
I’m isolated, but
I’m here
An audience of one
Maker and viewer sharing one body
Routine provides structure
In a broken system
Ritual soothes
Holds the cracks together
And gives purpose
I catch my reflexion
The skin is tired
I should apply clay
To pull out the bad
And keep in the good
Time dares me to dare
And as I spread the paste
My fingers ignore the limit
Of the jaw
Of the neck
My hand explores
I watch myself in the mirror
Rediscovering the texture of me
I cover myself
All of it
It dries
And pulls
And makes me aware
Of the layer that connects everything
To everything
I am the cracked salt flats
Of Death Valley
I am a jagged cliff
In the Atlas Mountains
But I’m here
(NYC, April 17th, 2020)
