ART FROM THE QUARANTINE | WEEK SEVEN | MOMENTS IN-BETWEEN
MARY O’BRIEN SPURRIER
Moments In-Between
Intermediate Instances in a Lifelong Pursuit.
A Distracted Gaze
Studio2020 NYC - A Still Life - Covid-19 Series
Limited Edition (cause I’m not going to be doing these Covid-19 paintings and drawings forever ya know).
#1 Tangerines, bowl, covid-19. Watercolor, graphite, vellum.
#2 Tangerines, bowl, tablecloth, covid-19. Watercolor on paper.
#3 Tangerines, bowl, tablecloth, covid-19. Watercolor on paper.
#4 Grapes, bowl, covid-19. Watercolor on paper.
#5 Apple, napkin, table, covid-19. Watercolor on paper.
#6 Toy Bird, covid-19. Graphite on paper.
#7 Coffee Cup, cookies, covid-19. Graphite on paper.
#8 Studio Table - Studio2020, Quarantine.
#9 My Studio2020, Quarantine.
ANDREE LJUTICA
This image was taken roughly one hundred twenty hours before my wife gave birth to Julian. It was taken three days before a waiting room, with sea foam walls intended to calm and elicit patience. But because of corona, they elicit worry. I can see through the latex paint, to the impalpable mesh of potentially harmful molecules. Here begins a lifetime of worry. In the waiting room, a pregnant woman walked in with extreme abdominal pain, but the check in nursing staff was more concerned with the fact that my wife and I are visitors from the epicenter: New York. Despite having been here for months, to them, we are the contaminants of their hermetically sealed world. First bit of anxiety down. After testing we were escorted to our new room, this one with calm and focused staff but a more nervous palette. The lights are dim but act only as a pall conceit for the energy in the room. We are the rhythmic pulse. Here is where the real change occurs.
Of course in life, change happens regularly. It is life. Not like in death, which is fixed and regular. Life is the progressive flux state. But here, in this room with the anxious walls and the resolved staff, this change state feels more pronounced. More obvious than any shift from then to now in a moment, or the subtlety of rotting fruit, corrosion of iron, and so on. This change, from pregnant to vacant, from anticipation to arrival, is of course monumental. Not all change shifts identity. With time, one can become more of himself or herself, but only these moments of profound flux can she become something new: a mother.
This image, taken thirty six hours before our arrival to the hospital, to these rooms with the pale walls and feverish glows, Robin’s face half in shadow, the other in light, I can’t help but to construct the narrative, not of light and dark, but of life and death. Obvious on some level, but deeply present and aching with a personal realness on the other. Death, not in the macabre sense of mortality, but the death of time and of life as we know it. Of death in life. Of her previous identity consisting of only my wife and daughter and professional and friend.
Like so many before, the moment or context in which this photo was taken is important in equal weight to its rendering. I’m reminded of eggleston’s red ceiling with the single dangling bulb and the proximity to death that made this particular red feel especially connected to vitality and blood as opposed to any other red within one’s syntactic understanding of redness. And how the because the red is now just not a red as one might locate at random, the single bulb means more as well. It means life and death. Or Lange’s photos of migrant workers that today appear ordinary to the degree that imagery of impoverishment has an unfortunate ubiquity. These photos of robin with the circuitously woven shadows across her face and body elicit a sense of transition that in fact is shared with its context. The movement from light to dark. The transition from woman to mother. To me, there is photography that is raw and unencumbered by story, that disregards the material outside of the frame and then there is photography that is enhanced by story or words or the context in which it is seen by public view. Being married to robin, I have hundreds of photos of her face in shadow, but this particular shadow, cast five days before Julian was born is deeper than any before.
FRANK FRANCES
ELVIS MAYNARD
Awakenings
Spring always reminds me of my grandfathers. The one, a dedicated gardener. The other an impassioned photographer of the natural world. My love of plants and photography created strong bonds between these two men and myself over the years. The photographer even gifting me one of his prized possessions; his favorite macro lens, with which he had enjoyed many years of documenting the details of the flora around him.
I spent the past couple weeks of the quarantine tending to my own garden, participating in the awakening of this small patch of green in this great big city of gray. In normal times, it is an escape from the incessant rush of New York City. Today, it is an escape from the pandemic and an oasis in my isolation. I used the very lens mentioned to capture these small occasions of revival.
