Pandemic Papers is an experimental archive. The project logs my feelings within the context of the headlines, painted on the Sunday editions of my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle. The project consists of over 40 paintings ranging in size from 8’ x 10’ to 1’ x 1’ created from November 2019, when COVID first appeared in Wuhan, to July 2021, when San Francisco finally retired its emergency order (hopefully?). Pandemic Papers gave me a way to store and recall my own personal experience of the pandemic despite my long term memory loss due to my brain injury.
The pandemic changed a lot about our lives and world so it makes sense that it would also lead to a major shift in my work. This is the first time in my practice I turned to painting as the critical tool for understanding the world. I have long been resistant to the medium but when used in relationship with the weekly churn of the newspaper it gave me a new way of finding where, when, who and how I was within that timeless time.
