Deep Breath (2021 – 2022)

 

After spending 14 months minimally interacting with the outside world prior to Covid vaccination, I found myself on the verge of claustrophobia. I lived in an area of the United States where people took few health precautions, and at times, recklessly and purposefully endangered others out of their own political anger. I had developed a deep distrust in my fellow citizens and their unwillingness to take simple actions that could keep people with pre-existing conditions, like my husband, safe. In the spring of 2021, I knew I would have to take uncomfortable steps if I was to re-learn how to function within society.

Portraiture has always been a challenge for me, and I knew I had to force myself to pair this genre with my artistic attempt to regain trust in others. In my series “Deep Breath”, I photographed both friends and strangers while we engaged in conversations about how the pandemic influenced their perceptions of people, our society, and our country. With my faith in these institutions shattered, I remain grateful to those who sat with me for these conversations to learn whether and how they had been changed, and what actions they were taking to cope and adapt. I represent our conversations, unexpectedly intense and private with many strangers, as letterform-based compositions whose abstraction references the difficulty of communication in our present societal moment.

Rather than create a faithful likeness of my sitters from behind the lens, I believed it more important to use lengthened camera exposures to visually document the time physically spent in the same room together, unmasked and breathing the same air. As such, the images became evidence of my efforts to combat the anxiety which arose over my time in isolation. I paired this method of image capture with an experimental print process that combines photography and screenprinting. Much like the early days of lockdown, that process is steeped in unpredictability. The resulting serendipitous visuals strip away any sense of place from the portraits, referencing the online voids that replaced physical interaction during this time. The conversations pieces employ more traditional chemigram techniques of hand-applying soft resists, as the elements of temperature and time craft the color, value, and texture of each composition. The layering of stenciled words embeds the secret experiences of my sitters into the light-sensitive paper.

Watch an interview to learn more about my concept and process for “Deep Breath”.