Freedom of Assembly
The themes of my creativity during the pandemic were domestic spaces and objects, revisiting unresolved works, and protest. During COVID-19, I spent much of my time when I was not at work producing works at home for my artist-in-residence group exhibition in October of 2020.
I spent a lot of the early days of the pandemic learning how to sew on sewing machines borrowed from two workplaces and sewing fabric face masks. I had two retired U.S. Flags that were waiting to be turned into artwork, and I was inspired to turn the field of blue into a face mask, and took the stripes from the flag to weave into a chess board. I titled the flag mask "My Body, My Choice" out of irony of the usage of that argument to argue against wearing masks during the pandemic. I was working as a gallery attendant at the World Chess Hall of Fame during the height of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter Protests, and decided to needle-felt a chess set for the Pieces vs. Pawns chess variant as a representation of the strength of protest. This piece is titled "Freedom of Assembly".
