Pandemic Showcase – Karen Adrienne, Jennifer Steen Booher, Donald Mallow, Bruce Forbes, Wendy Newbold Patterson

Karen Adrienne

In my monotypes the power of the environment and natural events are usually partially contained, or seen abutting a folded structure. In this work the folded structure of Before the Breach falls away in The Breach. Swells or roiling earth and water fold and crash into each other. The safety of the structure is diminished and the image is overwhelmed by the natural elements. Demise and the feeling of being overtaken is the lingering residual treat in The Breach.

 

Jennifer Steen Booher

I started experimenting with cyanotype last fall, and have been working on a series of contact prints of plastic shopping bags. My ideas are still evolving, but focus around the way these bags—formerly disposable and an environmental disaster—were starting to become a sought-after resource in 2019 when various cities enacted bans on them. My mother uses them to dispose of her cat litter, and she began to actively gather and hoard them, fearful that she wouldn’t have “enough.” 

We have two college-age children and staggered their returns from college as the campuses closed down in April. We did 14 days of self-quarantine when the first kid returned, then fetched the other and quarantined all over again. By the time we finished our 28 days at home, the whole state was essentially in quarantine, and I had moved from plastic bags to surgical masks.

 

Donald Mallow

With time rearranged, physical space limited, and encompassing terrible information almost beyond our control, concentrating and staying focused on drawing is an oasis. A growing number of drawings to date has been the result (Corona Series) since we began to shelter in place.

 

Bruce Forbes

 

Wendy Newbold Patterson

The Green Child image began appearing in my work over the winter and spring of 2019–2020. The central purpose of it wasn’t apparent to me until the pandemic arrived. Climate change and the environmental consequences of humankind’s continued destruction of nature beyond its ability to heal itself surfaced as related to the global proliferation of novel viruses. This dreaded consequence had been forecasted by climate scientists, epidemiologists and the Wabanaki and other indigenous peoples’ prophecies.

My work gradually formed itself into a story, a poetic-visual folktale—”The Story of the Green Child.” These three paintings are part of that story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image at top: Karen Adrienne, Before the Breach, monotype on paper, 22 x 30 x 1 in., 2020.