Quarantine Cats
During the Covid pandemic, I was among those lucky enough to be able to stay home and threw myself into work. In the uncertainty and emotional ups and downs of this difficult time, my two cats became the bright spots of my days. This series of Quarantine Cats are my reimagining of my pandemic experience, an attempt to transform the endless sameness of the days of lockdown into something--perhaps--somewhat magical. The minor chaos of a small apartment suddenly turned workspace, pantry, and broadcasting studio came to reflect for me the greater chaos of our world turned upside down. And yet, in the midst of the strangeness, the felines cared only that there were more things to climb on, rest on, and explore. Their shifting moods from curiosity, affection, and sheer disdain for me colored my days with a vibrancy beyond the scope of any individual moment. This series is specifically an attempt to capture some of that color, in all its desperate, dreamlike oversaturation. During the pandemic, I adopted the habit of drawing a tarot card each day, basically asking, "will everything be ok?" And so I titled each piece in the series after those archetypes. And finally, in a way, these paintings are about memory. The blank spaces -- incomplete walls or floors -- allude to those lost hours of doomscrolling in the middle of the night, memories we might wish to forget; and yet simultaneously the possibilities of specifics yet to be discovered, memories yet to be created.