Pandemic Media

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OCCUPATION.

ISOLATION.

COHABITATION

When we are isolated, when we are lonely, when we are alone, one response is to stay busy, to be occupied: OCCUPATION. Art is a beautiful doing, a practice. Making and engaging with art keeps us connected, attentive, active, and focused. When we are in ISOLATION, to protect our own and the public’s health, we can form pods and other forms of COHABITION that can provide support, comfort, touch, community, sex, and love. Carmine Santeniello’s Morning, finds two men in a bright busy room crowded together with many more: an octopus, turtle, bat, TV, and snail. But ISOLATION can also be suffered or practiced in crowds; it can keep us separate from goons. In Patrick Webb’s Ecco Punchinello: SWAT a clown glowing in golden oil paint steadfastly refuses connection to his oppressors.

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SIMULATION.

STIMULATION

When we are isolated we can seek for MORE. More pleasure, more touch, more sex, more food. We want and deserve STIMULATION. Eddie Valentine’s HOT DOG places its hot masturbatory protagonist in a multimedia collage of ever more indulgence: dragons, ram’s horn, goddesses, skulls in a mixed bag of media. In lockdown, and other times of aloneness, more can come in the form of too much: too much media, too much uncertainty, too much falsity: SIMULATION. Michael Harwood’s Juicy: (8^th Ave.) is a photographic explosion of (false) color?

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VISITATION

When we are isolated we can seek support, love, witness, from our ghosts: VISITATION. Tim Tate’s Justinian Oculus brings in hordes in cast led crystal. He explains:

This is my second pandemic, as I have lived through the AIDS crisis. So many souls have been lost to both. Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed, and yet hold crystal clear the memory of what happened years ago...of men and women long since dead . Yet who can say what is real and what is not? Can I believe my friends are gone when their voices are still whispering into my ears every night as I fall asleep. I will always believe they live on in my heart and mind.

When we are alone. we can conjure the people, ideas, images, and community we need. Real or imagined friends can drop by for a visit! Animals can surprise us with their cocky grace.

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REPLICATION

When we are isolated REPLICATION brings the many through multiplication, viral growth, copies, and the mechanized making of more. In Unknown Virus Variant, by Jonathan Leiter, a virus is made beautiful through hand-made precise applications of acrylic. When we are inhabited by more than one virus—as we all are, only some of them life-threatening—we can seek for patterns. Viral culture, capitalism, social media proclaim that more is always better. In You Viral Load is Up we see Kurt Weston left awash in an eerie blood bath of viral growth.

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ACTIVATION

When we are isolated we can seek repair, solutions, and change to the systems that got and keep us here. Through ACTIVATION we begin our work in response. Roberto Ordonez’s Vaccine pictures an ominous doctor, slick with layers of bright and cold PPE, introducing a much-needed medical response. But when we suffer needlessly, we protest, we install new meanings and things into familiar places to shake things up. In Landriel Oviedo’s installation, Sin Globos No Hay Fiesta (Without Balloons There Is No Party), we see a quiet city canal made alive with ideas, condoms, and color. When we activate, we invite and then join others in movements. We seek solace in nature. We hold power to account.

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BREATHING.

BELIEVING

When we are alone and scared we can find presence and solace in BREATHING. The strong swimmer painted in Leon McCutcheon’s Women at Rockaway Queen Beach struts forth to conquer the day. When a viral threat is air-borne, we sweat our exposures. We can find comfort and hope in BELIEVING … and dreaming.