While the Coronavirus continues to spread across the globe, our response to it has eased by many degrees. The COVID lockdown in 2020 certainly has made a lasting impact on our lives, both personally and professionally. Its effect clings to us in our motivation patterns, our work environment, and even our social lifestyles – with some too afraid to be as social as before and minimizing contact with others, and many others seeming to make up for lost social time.
Captive Isolation is a conversation of that difficult time. It is an interpretation and exploration of concepts of “Social Distance,” “Mask Up,” and “Lockdown.” How I chose to express this is with human figure and form, made bare, naked
and exposed.
The human nude is a classical prompt; often used in fine art illustrations and photography. In this series, I am relating this to the exposure to the coronavirus long before we were even made aware it existed and through the initial stages of the pandemic. Our bodies were vulnerable to the virus, and so
naked to the environment we were.
It was important to express a feeling of loneliness in this collection. Isolation does many things to the social mind, and being isolated, alone, and naked is certainly one way to illustrate this. Further, the concept of “masking up”
has become so commonplace now, but at the time was an imposition, a requirement. It can also be interpreted as us being ignorant of the goings on in the world, especially in relation to finding a viable vaccine. But in that sense, our masks can also be blindfolds or shrouds.
Lastly, the exploration uses bondage and kink as a visual metaphor for the lockdown. The loss of freedom; unable to relax and socialize as we would so choose. Instead, and with the understanding of safety, we freely surrendered our mobility to our caretakers and leaders, and let them dictate our decisions.
This is comparable to the relationship that a dominant or master has over their submissive.
The other link to the lockdown that this series connects to is the hyper sexualization experienced by many, which may have been a mix of a need to connect socially, survival instinct, and even boredom. Add this to the mix of frustration, sadness, anger, and in some cases, joy, that the pandemic caused
emotionally and mentally, and we can conclude that our personal experience with the lockdown is deeply personal and individually unique. However, I feel we all can relate to some aspects of the works presented in this series; not only locally, but internationally as well.
We may have been captive, isolated, and alone; but as the human community, we were alone together. – Jesse Merrell