Lights in the Tunnel: Creating Art in the Shadow of COVID-19

I have spent a lot of my time during this period “shelter in place,” catching up with friends by video, phone, and email. Having worked in the arts for twenty years, many of my friends are artists. Our conversations focus on health, well-being, and “the new normal.” And we also talk about “What happens to creativity in quarantine?”

The idea for this online exhibition originated with those conversations. Like everyone, artists are being affected psychologically, emotionally, physically, and financially by the pandemic. Artists are uniquely impacted as performances and art exhibitions have been canceled; galleries and museums have temporarily closed; freelance jobs have dried up; studios have become unaffordable or inaccessible; and teaching is now online. And yet there is still the desire to create art. For some artists, this is a period of time alone in the studio to make new work, continue past projects, or experiment. For others, studios are not accessible or are being lost, and art is being made at home, on a different scale, with new materials, or in pockets of “free time” while juggling family and work obligations. And still for others, this period of social isolation has been the raw material for art, and they are making work that explicitly comments on the pandemic and its impact on communities and families.

The world has also watched as artists have applied their unique skills to sewing masks and making other protective gear for healthcare professionals. I asked the artists in this show to talk about what they are making and how this current situation has altered their studio practice and art. This show features an array of artists working in various media, each responding differently to the current situation.

In the era of COVID-19, we can’t predict—or see—the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel,” but we do have glimmers of light inside it. For artists, it is the new work they are making. For the rest of us, it’s the art we are enjoying, often online.

-FW

This exhibition features works by: Rania Matar, Jennifer McClure, Kelsey Miller, Hadieh Shafie, and Jason Stopa.

As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, Rania Matar draws on her own life and cross-cultural experience to explore issues of identity in her photographic work. Focusing on girls and women, she explores adolescence and womanhood both in the United States and the Middle East. One look at Matar’s portraits, and it is evident that her photographic practice depends on proximity, time, and connection with her subjects– developing a relationship with them before and during photo shoots seems paramount to making revealing psychological portraits. So what does an artist do during the period of “social distancing” when her work depends on social interaction? For Matar, the “new normal” led to a new project.

Photographer Jennifer McClure’s life and work changed dramatically when she became a mother at age 46. Of course aspects of new motherhood can feel isolating, but now the photographer finds herself literally and indefinitely isolated as she quarantines with her family in New York City. As she adapts to the new reality of parenting and photographing in quarantine, McClure is focusing her photographic work on her new family, in their home performing the quotidian familial routines of the “new normal.” In her words:  “I’m photographing every day as a way to stay sane. If I don’t keep my hands busy, I’ll go crazy with anxiety and worry. My daughter is always with me these days, so she’s been my main subject. She’s twenty months old and she’s usually quite happy. I can’t help but have my spirits lifted when I focus entirely on her. I’m making photos about the objects and actions of the pandemic as well as how we fill our days.”

For Rhode Island based artist Kelsey Miller, this period of quarantine has meant more spontaneity in both the studio and the “classroom.” She describes her creative process as “more immediate and self-reflective.” Whereas she used to sketch out a print ahead of time, she now approaches a print with no concrete plans, making formal decisions along the way.  Art-making for Miller, like so many other things during this time, is about “responding to the moment.” With so much uncertainty, planning is difficult, both for art-making and teaching. For some people adversity breeds ingenuity. Such is the case with Miller’s students, many of whom are inventing creative solutions for the scarcity of traditional art materials.

Just as she encourages her students to use the materials available to them, her own studio practice has relied on using what she can find and re-use. Her work has always been concerned with the environment, and her current project during self-isolation is no different. For the series “We Need Less Than We think,” the artist is making fifty prints about earth to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. While visiting a beach near her home, she collected trash that was discarded there. Using the beach debris as stencils and reliefs, Miller makes monoprints in her home studio. She also fashions the rubber soles of her shoes into relief blocks and uses plastic letter forms in her monotypes, all of which are printed on old lithographs by the artist that she has cut down to 9 x 12 inches. The end result is meditative abstract prints compromised of evocative forms in a subdued, elegiac palette.

View a video of Kelsey in her studio space, below.

Growing up in post-Revolutionary Iran, Hadieh Shafie read books as an escape, making notes in the margins to remember what she had read. Now an artist in New York, Shafie makes colorful sculptures from scrolls, which she calls “ketab” (Farsi for “books”). Her art-making process begins with a drawing that the artist has offset printed onto strips of paper. She then paints the edges of the strips of paper and handwrites, using a brush, the same text repeatedly onto the strips of paper. Although it may seem as if Shafie is referencing the Islamic tradition of calligraphy, she is instead claiming subjectivity and agency for herself as a woman artist with a free gesture.

Now in quarantine, Shafie works on several projects simultaneously. In late March, Shafie and her husband left their home in New York to spend time in her childhood home in Maryland. The artist quickly established a makeshift studio in the dining room, where she enjoys the natural light and views of nature from two windows. In addition to busying herself with studio work, Shafie goes on long walks to “keep [her] mind and body healthy,”renewing her interest in landscape, flower and tree forms. Recently, she discovered a field of buttercups, left to grow rampant during COVID-19 when the fields aren’t being mowed. In this vision of buttercups lies not only the raw material for new work, but a powerful idea found in nature: that there is the chance for something beautiful to flourish in the face of difficulty. There will be regrowth.

Writer and painter Jason Stopa creates vibrant abstract paintings. In recent installations, Stopa has hung these paintings, with their colorful patterns, gestures, and motifs, upon gallery walls also painted with colorful patterns. In these room-sized installations, Stopa’s paintings become performative. How would I describe Stopa’s work in existing terms? Perhaps it is Pop Art color meets Baroque theatricality meets modernist gesture and form. It is simultaneously playful and serious and fresh. He describes his endeavor as expanding and critiquing formal issues. Interrogating  “painting’s status in relation to the wall and the architecture of the gallery,” Stopa is, in his words, “after a kind of pictorialism that opens up spatial concerns, where abstraction can be an image of itself. I use graphic color to create gradients, pattern and gesture. I make impasto marks, using paint squeezed straight out of the tube, to create illusionistic depth. I’m interested in how mark-making can create physical and atmospheric sensations that vie with sculpture and perform a painting.”

Social isolation has changed the way that Stopa feels and works. Whereas before he could go to his studio multiple times a week, he now goes once a week. He describes his mind these days as an “echo chamber” of feelings and ideas amplified by the isolation. The current situation has made it harder for him to focus. Still his initial creative process is the same: “I draw till I find a form that feels hard, unknown to me, and strange. It’s very difficult to get away from what you know, and I think that’s a goal. I don’t think I have the attention span and frequency to make a painting at this moment, but I’ve generated a number of ideas that I plan to get to soon.”

View a video of Jason explaining how his artmaking has changed, below.

Footage: Marley Reed, Music: Miles Schelling, Editing: Kelsey Miller.

A short documentary focusing on the practice of the visual artist; Hadieh Shafie. The artist talks about two inherent aspects of her work, it’s relationship to the embedded text and the use of color.

Directed by Maximilian Homaei