Pandemic Portrait
"Pandemic Portrait" is a procedural artwork that took root during 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 lockdown. As I began to spend vast amounts of time in Zoom meetings, I became fascinated by how each window was a kind of self-curated portrait in which the person chose a certain room, viewing angle, lighting, and costume. I found myself endlessly scrutinizing the backgrounds, voyeuristically analyzing them for what they could tell me about a person whose room I might never see for myself. I made a series of digital paintings inspired by Zoom screen captures, and from those created "Pandemic Portrait," an endless meta-Zoom that is both a portrait of one of the most common pandemic experiences and a set of several dozen portraits of people I spent time with in that virtual space. I included myself only in the form of line drawings of my listening postures.