Pandemic Diaries
Phoebe Boswell / Donghyun Chung / Lise Kjaer / Linda Stein
November 4 ~ December 3, 2021
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 4, 2021, 4 – 7 pm (masks required)
Liselle Powder of Academic Affairs read two poems, “Quarantine Experience” and “COVID: It Got Me” during the opening reception of Pandemic Diaries.
Liselle Powder’s poetry reading at the opening reception, “Quarantine Experience”
Liselle Powder’s poetry reading, “COVID: It Got Me” at the opening reception.
A Conversation with the Artists (Zoom): Wednesday, November 10, 1–2:30 pm (US Eastern Time)
Below the Eyes: Sexuality and Averting the Gaze, A Webinar by Artist, Linda Stein: Tuesday, November 23, 1–2 pm (co-sponsored by Have Art: Will Travel!) Register in advance here.
Multimedia artist Linda Stein presented this artist talk on November 23, 2021. Stein spoke candidly of growing up in the 1950s, discovering her Queer identity, coming out of the closet, and overcoming shame. Art has long been the vehicle for Stein to resolve her inner conflicts and to express herself. Her early "Profiles” drawings, collages, and mixed media, which depicted faces below the eyes, shifted to abstract sculpture and later, after experiencing 9/11 living and working in ground zero of lower Manhattan, to 3-D body armor-like sculptural work, a reference to protection, safety, and upstander behavior.
“Pandemic Diaries” presents works by four women artists who respond to the Covid-19 global pandemic from the perspective of their personal experiences. Largely isolated in their homes during the first several months of the pandemic, they produced works out of fear, boredom, self-care, a desire for social connection, and an intense drive for survival. The pandemic instilled a sense of urgency in these artists to express their personal struggles by making a record of the time as they confronted their own mortality with spurts of creativity, turning to their art to cope with an uncertain future and a longing for reconnection with loved ones. Their experiences are strikingly similar to many of our own feelings of isolation and horrific memories. The results are intimately scaled, diaristic expressions of deeply personal concerns that are nonetheless universal. Spanning drawings in immersive installation to collage, the exhibition is filled with strong figuration and abstraction, each artist attempting to restore humanity under the attack of the invisible virus. Their work is a reflection of our time that invites us to consider the common experience of the global pandemic and what may lie ahead.
Phoebe Boswell, Notes on a Lockdown: You’ve Got to Draw Yourself In, 9 5/8 in. x 14 1/8 in., Pencil on paper, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and SAPAR Contemporary.
Phoebe Boswell presents Notes on a Lockdown, a series of drawings and watercolor on paper made during the UK’s third lockdown. Created between December 2020 and April 2021, the works feature varied subjects, including self-portraits, screenshots of various social media pages, and other scenes that explore Boswell’s ongoing interest in portraiture, technology, memory, and resilience. The site-specific works on paper are linked together by line drawings on the gallery walls and a video with a soundtrack of breathing that signifies that even inhaling air could be deadly. In this immersive installation, one can find several self-portraits of the artist with filters hinting at various emotions and self-awareness. Some drawings are based on screenshots taken from Instagram, Twitter, and FaceTime related to posts or friends that made the artist feel connected during the lockdown. Others reference the artist’s solitude: no Internet signal on her device, a long empty corridor, and withered flowers.
Donghyun Chung, Untitled from a series, Pandemic Diary, 12 in. x 12 in., Mulberry paper (Hanji) on wood panel, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Donghyun Chung presents Pandemic Diary, a series of portraits of her family and friends wearing facemasks—literal pandemic portraits that by now are familiar images. As her text translator and daughter notes, the underlying motivation for this diaristic work was prompted by the fear of uncertainty in works that recall “Today” (1966–2013), the Dates Painting by On Kawara in which nothing more than the date which they were made appears, thus recording the continuity of time and offering an exercise in meditation. As is her longtime practice derived from using Hanji (Korean mulberry paper), Chung adopted 12” x 12” wooden panels as her format, and adhered to the rule of creating a single portrait each day, resulting in myriad unique variations. Thus, the isolation of the pandemic imposed a daily record of time and stress. Chung’s Asian and Asian American subjects also express the collective anguish felt by their community amid the heightened racial discrimination and outright violence against them during the pandemic.
Lise Kjaer, Insomnia 5:02am, 2020. Short Video.
Lise Kjaer, who was confined to her small studio apartment in NYC during the Covid-19 pandemic, found herself gravitating toward the “simple things:” keeping healthy by cooking nutritious food and just “staying alive.” Over three months, she experienced insomnia and oddly interrupted sleep patterns. Kjaer developed a series of short videos using what was at hand—her iPhone—not merely to cope, but to embrace the moment. Giving the experience a form was crucial in such fluid and uncertain times. Her black-and-white Insomniavideo series hypnotically frames the confined view of her sleepless nights. Insomnia 5:13 am is based on Kjaer’s first trip to her studio in Brooklyn. Traveling by ferry to avoid the risk of contagion on the subway, she filmed the rhythm of the water. Harking back to the Fluxus film tradition, Kjaer’s footage is simple and continuous: shots of dim lights, whether moonlight or a street light outside her window or dim shadows of tree branches, suggest both melancholy and hope amidst the grim reality of the pandemic.
Linda Stein, Confronting the Villain 1094, Limited edition fine art print: archival inks on watercolor paper, 13 in x 19 in. 2020, 2021, Courtesy of the artist.
Linda Stein sheltered in place in her thirty-first floor apartment in Tribeca, producing fine art prints, along with a love-poem video to New York and its essential workers. The arresting vista from the artist’s balcony highlights Lower Manhattan with its Freedom Tower, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, providing a cityscape of sentinel-like figures that stand as tall as skyscrapers and symbolize protection. Pop-culture figures, including Wonder Woman, stand bravely against the common villain, suggesting the healthcare professionals and first responders who have defended the rest of us. Breaking out of the confines of quarantine, the figures dance on building tops (as in Stein’s Romp and Rollick 1008) addressing our existential longing for human connection. In the eight minutes of Covid Story: An Artist Sheltered in Place on the 31st Floor, Stein invites the viewer into the spaces between power/vulnerability, masculinity/femininity, aggressor/defender, and joy/fear.
Artist Biographies
Phoebe Boswell (b. 1982, Kenya; lives and works in London)’s media include drawing, animation, audio, video, writing, and performance. Her art culminates in layered installations that interact with the environments they occupy. Her radical imaginary of Black feminism is a tool for contemplating the body as world rather than as an object to be gazed at, thus her art-making provides a political service to the larger community. Boswell studied Painting at the Slade (2005) and 2D Animation at Central St Martins (2009). Her work has been exhibited at Autograph; Tiwani Contemporary; Sundance Film Festivals, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2015, and Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2016. She received the Future Generation Art Special Prize in 2017, and recently unveiled a large-scale moving image work 'PLATFORM' as part of the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporainin Geneva. Boswell was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, and is a current recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and a Ford Foundation Fellow. She will present newly commissioned works at Prospect P5 in New Orleans (January 2022) and Hache Noce in Oaxaca, and has had solo exhibitions at New Art Exchange, Nottingham and Sapar Contemporary, New York (May 2021). Boswell is represented by Sapar Contemporary, New York.
Donghyun Chung (b. South Korea; lives and works in Los Angeles County) creates portraiture, abstract 2D and 3D works, and contemporary furnitureby combining traditional Korean mulberry paper (Hanji) with layering and erosion techniques using rice flour glue, power drill and sandpaper. The process of mashing together, tearing down, and scraping, while laborious, is a source of comfort, and Hanjiserves as a bridge to past generations of Korean women’s toil and endurance. Chung received her BFA from Seoul National University and studied at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. Her work has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, Fullerton College, LA Artcore, and at Korean Cultural Centers throughout the US. She has instructed students in her technique through Los Angeles Public Library programs. Chung has been based in Los Angeles County for over three decades, where she also worked extensively in ceramics.
Lise Kjaer (b. Denmark; lives and works in New York) works with light in video, projections, and installations. She is interested in how we see the world through the filters of our senses, memories, and desires, and navigate our perceptions along the thin line between the illusionary and the real. Kjaer received an MFA withDistinctionfromtheAcademyofFineArtsinWarsaw,Poland,anda PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. Kjaer hasexhibitedinternationally in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland, and the US. She was a fellow ofNIFCA, the Nordic artist-in-residence program in Helsinki, Finland; The Danish Art Council'sResidency on Hirsholmen; The Danish Art Studios, Copenhagen; Hollufgaard Artist Studios in Odense; Svanekegaarden, Svaneke; The Studios of Key West; and The Danish Visual Artists’ Berlin Residency Program. Sheteachestwentieth century and contemporaryartattheCityCollegeofNewYork.
Linda Stein (b. 1943, US; lives and works in New York) is a feminist artist, activist, educator, and writer. She is Founding President of the non-profit Have Art: Will Travel! Inc (HAWT) for Courageous Kindness, addressing bullying and diversity. HAWT currently oversees The Fluidity of Gender: Sculpture by Linda Stein (FoG) and Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females – Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein (H2F2), two traveling exhibitions with educational workshops. Other exhibitions for travel include: Displacement from Home: What to Leave, What to Take (DC4); Sexism and Masculinities/Feminities: Exploring, Exploding, Expanding Gender Stereotypes (SMF); Below the Eyes: Sexuality and Averting the Gaze.In 2018, Stein was honored as one of Women’s eNews’s 21 Leaders for the 21st Century. She received the 2017 NYC Art Teachers Association/UFT Artist of the Year award, and the 2016 Artist of the Year Award from the National Association of Women Artists. Stein’s art archives are at Smith College, and the Linda Stein Art Education Collectionis housed at Penn State University. In 2020, Penn State endowed in perpetuity an annual Linda Stein Upstander Award (with yearly awards starting at $1500) for scholars using Stein’s archives to inspire the Bullied, Bullies, and Bystanders to become Brave Upstanders for justice.
Pandemic Diaries was curated by Hyewon Yi, Director of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, who offers her thanks and heartfelt appreciation for the assistance and support provided by Olivia Carrera-Lazo, Annamarie Ho, Jane Chung, and Nina Levent and Joelle Araujo of Sapar Contemporary, NY.
Gallery Hours:
Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays: 10 am – 4 pm
Wednesdays, Thursdays: 12 pm – 4 pm and by appointment
