Making A Way | Solace
Artists: Fern T. Apfel, Laurén Brady, Daniel Kukla, Laurel Lueders, Richard Nickel, Jennifer Printz, Leviticus Shand, William Tourtillotte
Statement
Quarantine Days is a moving-picture expression of life during the quarantine period of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. To make this work, light is observed in the domestic space over the course of days and finally, early in the morning, I begin making still photographs of a darkened stretch of surface. As the sunlight enters the space, consequent photographs made at a regular interval depict the light making incremental progress across the frame. With sometimes over a thousand frames made in a day, these are then stacked and animated on a computer.
This record of days is meant to survive as a document of a singular experience shared across the globe. It is meant to recall a time in our lives when insecurity gripped the population ahead of a future that defied forecast; no one knew what would happen next, and as the days passed the notion of time grew looser.
Quarantine Days is meant to be installed in the darkened gallery space on phones, on laptops, on televisions and as projections, the concept being that the great many of us passed the quarantine on a series of screens, cycled daily in a uniform way. That is literally what the piece is: days passing on screens, proof that the planet is still hurtling through the vacuum of space in spite of any events taking place on its surface.
Bio
Leviticus Shand is an artist living and working in Chicago, IL. His works have been concerned with human conditions in the Rust Belt, with the ways in which a person and a city imprint upon one another, and now with what retail, the savior of many Rust Belt communities, will do with its post-COVID fallout. During the quarantine his work grew to express the daily homebound condition: a life lived from one screen to another, while the sunlight projected into his domestic space would glide silently over the interior and finally disappear, day after day.
In the year before the quarantine, he was married, received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and embarked upon a yearlong residency at Lillstreet Art Center, where he teaches photo classes (online). He’d like to thank the essential workers putting in endless hours to carry this country, on their backs, into the new future.
levishand.com
Instagram: @lshand
