Souvenirs From The Pandemic Gift Shop
2020 – 2022
Stay inside. Wash your hands. Wear a mask. try not to overdose on national news.
For months, the only signs of life on my dead-end street were masked postal workers, Amazon and UPS drivers. It was all pretty strange until it became normal. While the coronavirus swept the globe, solitude turned disturbingly abstract but like everyone else we just accepted it while we stared at the calendar.
Those strange days kicked off months upon months of working from home smothered by digital media from laptops, iPhones, Zoom meetings, Netflix — an umbilical noose of visual noise. It was hypnotic and harmful in ways that I will never fully understand. Now pixel-headed, sleeping became a struggle and the casual respite of alcohol and caffeine escalated to toxic levels.
Perhaps to rescue itself, my imagination began to introduce new visuals to be drawn by hand on paper, away from pixels and back to pencils. Daydreams became sketches and then artwork piling up in the corner of the studio. Some were trashed and some were saved. Because when the world goes to shit — artwork & humor can be a great antidote.