Gap Year I, May

The pandemic and quarantine have left me with a confused sense of time. When I think back on my memories of the past several years, I no longer have a good sense of how long-ago specific events took place. Life before the pandemic seems both very distant but, at the same time, strangely recent given that 2020 was mostly a blur- essentially a lost year spent indoors, on Zoom and with minimal physical connection to the outside world. In this series I combine two photographs- one image from 2019 and another taken on the same date in 2021. The space between the images is taken up with cross-stitch embroidery representing the lost year of 2020, accessible only in fragments and blended into the years coming before and after. The embroidery creates the effect of pixelized fractures of the two images merged together. The pattern of the embroidery is based on traditional, vernacular designs representing the domestic space and slowness of being indoors during the pandemic. The embroidery bleeds into the negative space of the page as a reference to phototropism- the process by which plants physically move closer to windows in order to be closer to the light.