Bloom
2021
In December 2021, as the COVID pandemic continued to weave its way through our lives in the forms of new variants, continued isolation, and the ongoing fracturing of American society, I transformed the home in which I had lived through the first months of quarantine into an art installation somatically inviting visitors to journey back in time from the beginning of the pandemic through the end of 2020.
Over two weeks, 60 people in 10 separate showings joined for a self guided tour through my house.
This project grew out of an ongoing curiosity I had about the particularity of shared experience that is lived in solitude. So many people hunkered down in their apartments or houses during the spring of 2020, sharing in isolation. I wanted to explore what would happen if that isolated experience was revisited as a communal one, if I invited people into their own memories through the excavation of my own.
The installation started out observational, the visitor following the path through my own journey into quarantine, but then shifted to become interactive, inviting guests to explore what came up for them in their own bouts of forced solitude and fear, and what new tools of care and ways of finding community they developed through those restraints. I met visitors at the end of their tour in the kitchen to share a recipe from my March-May 2020 Pandemic Cookbook while reflecting on the experience of both the installation and this era of living.