NAVIGATING UNCERTAINTY: AN ARTIST’S PANDEMIC JOURNEY, IS A BODY OF WORK THAT STARTED IN INDIA AND CONTINUES TO GROW WITH NEW WORK IN THIS AGE OF ANXIETY.
As the Covid-19 pandemic took hold of our collective social unconscious, I documented my experience in a new body of work “Navigating Uncertainty: An Artist’s Pandemic Journey.” These images have recently been displayed in a solo show at the Aurelia Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although personal in nature, by interacting with vast amounts of people who attended the show, my heart skipped a beat as I saw people relating to the images and the feelings they evoke. The psychic states of uncertainty, loneliness and even hope became palpable to the viewers. Through photography, isolation transformed into connection; separation into communion. I realized that although the work detailed my experience of living through pandemic times, the sentiments and themes were universal.
This photographic survey details my travels beginning In March 2020 while I was in India. I went from the magical world of fire and light at the Shivarti Festival in Kerala to a rushed return to self isolation in the United States. With New York being the epicenter of the virus, I took temporary refuge in Massachusetts and spent one month in self-isolation in a dark hotel. In subsequent months, I took tentative steps to explore the environment and people’s adaptation to living in pandemic times. I returned to my home in Brooklyn in summer and found a turbulent New York; sometimes ghostly empty, other times alive with activity and protest. In the autumn of 2020 I left NY to go to New Mexico to avoid an impending second wave. There, in shut down, I found lonely landscapes of car culture, religiosity and animals acting erratically.
During this time of uncertainty, I looked to the internal landscape of my mind to ponder the emotions taking place under such duress. I created self-portraits to express the psychic states of fear, loneliness, hope and the madness of feeling caged-in. I used a variety of lighting and techniques to render mood, inspired by film, art and history such as Picasso’s periods of Rose and Blue and their melancholic atmosphere. One series of alter-ego self-portraits is The Covidtorians. Rendered in a manner to represent a traditionally processed tintype, these images harken back to the Victorian era but with a modern twist. Like The Madwoman in the Attic, a book which highlights female writers during the Victorian era, the images reference Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
The photographs show some of the multiple faces that one can wear. Like a chameleon, the depictions used the magic of light to transform. Time after time in my solo show Navigating Uncertainty, people did not recognize that these images were me. I was delighted to see this transcendence as the photos became symbolic and universal with viewer’s connecting with the frames of mind espoused.