When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, I self-quarantined at home like so many others. Feeling cut-off and disoriented, I listened to the news, watched the light change and the shadows move, and surveilled my neighbors as they walked their dogs. At first, I couldn’t find it within me to paint anything. After a while I began to paint what I saw from my limited window on the world – the view from my fifth-floor balcony. I painted things I usually wouldn’t notice and used aggressively cropped and sometimes vertiginous views as a way of expressing a personal and collective sense of isolation, disconnection and uncertainty. After a while I also began to paint works that are composites of different memories and places drawn from walks around my neighborhood. These are vaguely familiar, mundane spaces where no one would want to linger, in a slippery space between public and private, inhabited and abandoned.
As I continue to work on this series, I have realized that it is a meditation our relationship to the environment and to each other. As a society we construct realities, we shape our environment to suit our desires. Soon the environment reflects our values. Then it shapes us.