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(2020-2022)
inkjet prints with cutout sections, mounted to white plexiglas with aluminum frames
57” x 42” / 42” x 63” / 42” x 24”
When I arrived in Venice, in November, 2019, the Rialto Market was severed at the knee. The worst flooding event in fifty years had overtaken the city at every high tide, twice a day, which forced a pace that was mirrored by the ebb and flow of the city’s residents. It changed the entire movement of the city. New walking routes were formed through the streets, bags were held unnaturally high, footsteps slowed against the pressure of water. An eerie alarm could be heard nightly to warn of the next high tide, sounding the beginning of another cycle.
A month after I returned from Italy, the first coronavirus case appeared in China. Soon after, the world watched as Italy was overtaken by the epidemic in sudden and drastic measure. As the endemic became a pandemic and the parameters of our lives changed, and we traded our social spaces for indoor spaces, I was reminded of the floods in Venice that past November. I poured over the tourist-common snapshots I’d taken, the historic thoroughfares filled with urban life, and I thought about the absence of people in the streets outside my studio.
Off and on for two years, I cut and removed figures from my pictures. The memory of the Venice floods occurred to me a prelude to the pandemic—a precursor of our withdrawal from social life. I thought of absence and how it can be present in forms like vacant streets. I thought about the imperceptibility of the virus and its power to redirect our movements, to remove us from the spaces we have come to occupy.