pandemic time warp

Pandemic Time Warp

100 feet of 1/4 tubing wrapped with 7 ply waxed linen

My current artwork is about the isolation, monotony, and chronic stress that has been brought on by the global pandemic. For me personally, the distortion of time has been both challenging and inspiring. The shape of days, weeks, and months over this past year sometimes seemed to be condensed and at other times stretched out. 2020 life felt like a time warp where everything both stood still and was simultaneously in chaos. Home confinement erased the markers I relied on to keep track of time and life felt like it was hanging in a perpetual state of suspension. To add to the disorientation, last year wasn’t marked by just one big crisis, but a cascade of them: a killer virus, political chaos, racial strife, and environmental catastrophes all amplified by one another.

I began to create art that illustrated the repetitiveness of the days and months. “Pandemic Time Warp” is an installation of 200 feet of 1/4 inch clear tubing wrapped with black and red 7-ply waxed linen. Hand-written and typed messages were placed between the fiber and the tubing core, expressing the various emotions that arose as the days went on. After working on the piece for the day, a portion of the tubing was left empty in order to impose an artificial endpoint to each day.

In conjunction with the physical piece, I assisted in composing an audio component that plays while viewing the installation. 100 feet of the tubing was measured and, in collaboration with a musician, each segment of the piece was then indexed and mapped into an audio representation. Of the 101 segments measured, 50.5 inches were clear tubing and 49.5 inches were coiled with fiber. 

I believe that this body of work is a reflection of the infinite time loop experienced during this pandemic, as well as a diary of my emotions. Through this piece, I have created a language that expresses what time has meant to me and how it continues to change over the course of this pandemic.