Perceptions of Love in the Time of Covid-19
How does love exist during a pandemic?
The answers to this question are limitless and subjective, and that’s what makes this exhibit in our hometown of Sullivan County, NY: “Love in the Time of Covid-19,” so intriguing.
The group exhibition opens at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, 37 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY this weekend, and ahead of the event, we were able to talk to four of the artists showing. From a photographic series on the duality between self-love and self-neglect; to mourning the loss of a mother; and marveling at an essential worker’s love for New York City—these works of art are viscerally honest and alive, and we’re so proud to display them on The Dandy.
If you find yourself in upstate, NY sometime soon, go visit The DVAA to see this show in-person through March 27.
Untitled, Danielle Case, 2020
“My perception of love changed dramatically in the time of Covid. This pandemic forced me to see myself through my own lens. It’s a journey that began in March, when complacency outweighed comfort. At this stage of life, every year brings a new discovery that is a bit different from the last. Eleven months of meeting a person that is unfolding in ways still new. Throughout the months, compassion bloomed for the one model who wouldn’t get bored of me. Photographing myself became my definition of love in the time of sickness. A learned love for myself, found through the lens of an 80D. Intense and intimate, a love that is awkward and ugly at times, one I can’t look away from, and one I no longer desire to look away from.”
“Michael,” Julia Justo, 2020
“My work focuses on the effects of the pandemic. I honor those essential workers that put their life at risk every day because of their love for the city they live in.
This photograph was taken in a New York City subway platform on April 20th, 2020 one of the city's worse days in terms of the number of infections and deaths. New York City’s subway system was a major disseminator – if not the principal transmission vehicle – of coronavirus infection. Nevertheless Michael, an immigrant and essential worker, was still on the job to serve us all.”
“Lost in The Fog of Hope,” Alice Zinnes, 2020
“My mother, the poet Harriet Zinnes, died on November 30, 2019, and through these covid months of solitude I have had the quiet to discover how to channel her love, life and being into who I am as an artist, in terms of feeling her unwavering belief in me, the passion she had for poetry, my own grief – and her unwavering belief in life, and the power of love. This poem below by my mother expresses much of what the painting I have submitted says: the love of hope.”
When Stars May Shine
By Harriet Zinnes
(published in Weather Is Whether, Marsh Hawk Press, 2012)
In the evening
when light is gone
when stars may shine,
and the moon may appear
in full, in half-light
or in a mere stream of light,
there is a sense of ending,
of doors being closed,
of a finale that is hidden
and yet boisterously alive.
There are ghosts flitting in darkened rooms
in the evening,
ghosts unseen, mysterious manipulations of human dreams
that appear and disappear
like unheard lightning bolts.
And when evening ends its gloomy descent,
and the dawn slowly rises,
the peace of beginning relaxes into day,
and light is a new smile of a cosmic delirium.
