Crusts, 2020

I lost the ability to make work at home once shelter-in-place started, so I went to the Santa Cruz mountains to stay with my dad and make use of his garage. He is a trained painting contractor and occasionally works as such, so he has lots of extra paint and other materials which I gratefully utilized for the creation of “fragments of land,” as I was thinking of this work. I suppose I was both trying to orient myself to a new reality and trying to avoid it, letting my mind imagine the new frontiers of other planets as a form of escapism. But the realization that this planet was rapidly becoming a new frontier because of COVID, reckonings with white supremacy, and an inability to plan ahead more than a day or two at a time, began to superimpose these imaginary worlds onto my own. I could have been living on Mars, for all I knew, or some strange upside-down place. That disorientation became a visual language, a blurring of topography and fabric, something deep inside me wanting a handful of something to cling to for stability, to remind me of something I know well: a mountain, a horizon, a collar, a stitch.