We are living in an incredibly unprecedented and surreal moment in time, in history. This project is a response to, or a means of conveying visually, the strange dissonance between the rapidly changing state of the world and the sense of sameness, of constancy and repetition, within the small bubble that is my family’s home right now–-a sameness that makes one day bleed right into the next, that makes me forget what a true seven-day week feels like, makes me forget what month it is. Typical renditions of daily work and school schedules have fallen by the wayside, and we are left to discover, or to decide for ourselves, what new rituals will become the markers of structure within our everyday lives. All the while, time becomes marked also by shifts in the pandemic’s course; calendar dates are replaced by case counts, and shifts in the seasons seem inconsequential when compared to shifts in a statistical curve.
This project engages with questions about the ways in which we reenact our yesterdays as we spend our time in quarantine, and themes of repetition, passage of time, and family. The photographs document four consecutive days of this “reenactment,” and dance the line between the staged and the candid, between fiction and truth; they constitute not a fictive narrative but rather an amplification of the very real experience that has become my––our––everyday. By reenacting the same five photographs, I portray the way in which a day’s progression is marked by those rituals which occur at nearly the same hour day after day, acting as checkpoints as I move about this newfound schedule. Each image is marked by a timestamp, calling to mind the notions of archive and history associated with film snapshots; instead of the month and date, I’ve included the total number of COVID-19 cases recorded up to the end of the given day, along with the time at which the photograph was taken.
