Item description
A black pen drawing on a white background. At the bottom of the piece is a tied plastic bag bulging with water, holding a goldfish. The goldfish rests at the bottom of the bag. The bag remains on the white floor, which fades into a black darkness past the bag. At the top of the piece is a text message conversation beginning on the right side with a gray text bubble and white lettering reading “Have they moved you to the ICU?”. The response continues to the left in three messages in white text bubbles and black lettering: the first, “Yea”; underneath that “It’s on a Covid for, we’re all in glass rooms”; correcting the error is “Floor*”. Next to the piece on the right are the name and the words “Moriah LeFebvre”, “Untitled”, “Ink drawing”, and “2020”.
Image | 2024
Works In Rough Going: Recovery Community and Communication During the Pandemic 9
Moriah LeFebvre
The drawings in this series contain words collected and curated from text message exchanges between members of the recovery community during the COVID-19 pandemic. I paired their messages with the images that these words evoked for me when I took the time to sit with them. Text messages are fleeting and digital; they aren’t meant to last. Yet during the pandemic, these pixels on screens became lifelines. I wanted to honor them, to memorialize them and commit them to permanence, deliberately and slowly. I hand drew all of the pieces in this series, sometimes taking the further step of using the sun to expose and create cyanotype prints of the drawn images.
