Lest We Forget

I had a friend once who was convinced she could change her past more than her future, just by forgetting. That recollection was my starting point. This exhibition is an examination of what I thought a post covid world would be (from the point of view of lockdown) and what it has been. I began by reimagining characters I had created prior to the pandemic, characters who seemed to be in the midst of something catastrophic, like the pandemic. However, when I first imagined these characters, their dignity was inviolable; they were resilient and almost immutable in the face of adversity. Now, in 2024, they re-emerge. They are recognizable for the most part, but they are not the same. Their forms are incomplete, they have gaping voids replaced by shadow and silhouette. Details are replaced by rudimentary sketches, and memories of parts which are no longer present. They have been fractured and reassembled.

I have struggled to understand how the life I lived in 2019 has never simply resumed where it left off. The time I've spent in the studio recently was an effort to understand this. For the first time in many years, these works were made without the consideration of an audience. They were made as a part of my examination, and their existence is a derivation of that process.

As much as I have told myself: our masks are off, we can shake hands, hug and trust – I find I have arrived in an environment that is in many ways more isolating, more fractured, and more polarized than the world I closed my apartment door on in 2020. While the anxiety of the pandemic is all but gone, the disassociation remains. The light hearted and casual acquaintances I once had are now, potentially, hard lined allies or enemies. Those amicable disagreements and debates have been replaced by extreme and cemented positions. There is a under current of tension that lies beneath the surface of many seemingly inconsequential social interactions. It feels like dancing on thin ice.

This is life in a post-truth world; where we are inundated with information and disinformation, where the structures and institutions that we once looked to as arbiters of the truth are either behind pay walls, or the subject of conspiracy theories. It's a natural progression. When you can no longer tell what is fact and what is fiction, then everyone and everything is suspect. The characters in these images are mired in alpha numeric strands. These strands are all the same 5 sequences. I chose to do this because repetition creates the illusion of credibility. Hence, if you repeat the same lie enough, it becomes the truth. Even if this is some cryptic code that you don't understand, the pattern is recognized. In a post-truth world, all patterns are suspect.

We also seem to have exited the pandemic at about the same time as technology decide to determine that humans were becoming obsolete. That, indeed, the miserable tasks of folding laundry, filing taxes, and taking out the trash would continue to require your participation. However, art and literature and music, and all the things that are a respite to the tedium of modern life, can now be made without you. All the knowledge of 10,000 years had been fed to a silicon wafer that is now bigger, better, and smarter than you.

While we all sat home, mostly alone, questioning our life choices during the pandemic and vowing to reprioritize, re-evaluate and live our best lives, those aspirations evaporated quickly under the increased financial pressures of housing insecurity and manufactured inflation.

Throughout this period, the climate crisis has also been chugging along as an existential threat that remains to be adequately addressed. We are literally sitting on our hands while the world becomes less and less inhabitable.

And – as if right on cue – every crisis has an autocratic despot waiting in the wings with promises: to quell your fear, to fix everything and, of course, to find a scapegoat to blame. Hate is an effective tool to distract people from a world view, and force them to focus on the “other” across the border or down the street. This is the post pandemic world we arrived in and it is not 2019. All the while, H5N1 is sitting in the shadows posing an even greater (potentially) threat than Covid-19, while politicians argue about transgender bathrooms and immigration. It's as if we have learned nothing.

This body of work was a way for me to spend some time alone, creating and considering all the voids that still exist as way for me to understand myself and what others might be experiencing. While the pandemic has ended, the implications of it have not. Despite the normalcy of day to day life, there are subtle things at play here that continue to keep many of us guarded and isolated, and prevent us from re-establishing the connections that existed in 2019.

The prices of the pieces in this exhibit are all numeric palindromes; sequences that are the same in forward and reverse. This was a simple way for me to express that we had started a sequence of events, ill prepared and over confident, and quickly reverted to a previous level of arrogance. I.E: a numeric sequence that changes and simply reverts. The sequence literally follows the same deviation in reverse to arrive back where it began. It's a loop.

There seems a collective sense of exhaustion that has been exploited and has divided people. Overwhelmed, there are increasing undertones of resignation. In our haste to move on, we have failed to address some critical effects of this pandemic. I have no intention of ending this diatribe with some overly optimistic platitude or some superficial remedy. I am simply observing it.

Eddie Colla

The Stain of Vacant Angels

A fifth (of the way) into a new century,

there were warnings.

We watched a pandemic rip through our entire civilization

and bring the world to a screeching halt.

We read the papers,

wished and waited.

We longed.

We tried to unite, with exceptional failure.

We counted our dead without properly mourning.

We put our friends and families in refrigerators.

We hid our consequences.

We blamed and pointed fingers.

We fought for all the wrong remedies.

Like children, we fought and threw temper tantrums.

Parts of us died – the good parts.

Time stopped.

This had never happened to us before,

and likely might not again.

We thought.

Parts of us were cut off, and have not grown back.

We buried the victims,

and carried around the resentment of our financial losses.

This went on for years.

We were unprepared for eventualities.

It wasn't cost effective.

Failures can be opportunities,

should you learn from them.

One day on the west coast of America,

the sun never came up.

We had actually stopped tomorrow from coming.

We stared into the red sky, slack jawed and awe struck.

Staring our death in the face.

In that darkness, the weight of consequence was crushing.

The sun eventually returned,

and the pandemic subsided.

We went back to jobs we hate.

We started our cars.

Began removing people from their homes,

and let children go hungry again.

Today, there are millions of birds flying over head

with a pathogen that's in our food.

In our milk,

in our carbon dense air and contaminated water.

And we lumber forward, talking of growth and scale.

With amnesia,

having learned nothing.