Days of Quarantine
Information + Updates

Days of Pandemic Quarantine was a project led by Dolores Wilber that sought to piece together the many fractured relations caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic in the United States from March 2019 through May 2021. Through daysofpandemicquarantine.com, the project created its own loose algorithm unlike those of contemporary social media, more similar to the intimacy of early internet or long-form blogs. By asking for contributions from acquaintances, artists, teachers, students, and drifters Dolores collected any and all remnants of life.

These extensive contributions build a forgotten sort of internet profile, arising questions around human connectedness, the future of social practice, and constructed historical narratives. They also provide a time capsule unlike the non-linear and endless scroll of social media and e-commerce’s design. Many of the sentiments documented on the website imprinted deep marks. Often in life, these significant events pass by with no record, masked as the mundane day-to-day of survival.

Over the past year, I wrote for preservation and to find a meeting place. I kept a regular journal of my thoughts and drawings, publishing almost every page on daysofquarantinepandemic.com. In a recent entry from May, I wrote about a week when my friend had hives spreading across her body. I held her in my arms and felt her cry. Her body was heavy with emptiness, weighted by the wet of tears. Moments like this are when I feel I can never receive a certain happiness I once knew. Health without her body, like many confronted by sickness throughout the pandemic, I was forced into a minimal state: my friends stripped of many powers. Bareness, the optimistic turn-of-the-century futurism without its smiling embellishments of human connectivity, video game health icons, glowing green plus signs and revitalizing someone in Call of Duty for the first time at age 12, wheatgrass shots and personalized vitamin delivery, the stoniness of a front porch step, finally touching, everything in technology’s touch becomes a button. It is an unpredictable devastation. No one tells you how hopeless it will feel to confront such a loss of faith. Just as much as people like to say some things never change, some things are changing in my sleep.

History is sometimes a timeline, or a photograph. One date, but something that has passed, and something to view with the smugness of a Future Person. I think this project may propose another viewing. In accepting various fragments of contributor’s lives, we may understand in some way a radical disconnect from the immaterial, the instantaneous and the disposable streams of internet consciousness. Instead, we need our body, daily, waking life’s consciousness as a root of survival. There is some slowness in these many contributions, as it was experienced grappling with events that felt like dancing between forever and never.

Documenting an unbelievable time with honesty and without judgement is not easily done. It requires persistence and patience to be a strict observer of life when it is overwhelmingly joyous, painful, or seemingly mundane. In photos collected by Diane Wilber, she documents the locations of found signs and barriers; public spaces’ responses to COVID-19. While the photos plainly depict a physical place, Diane’s contributions reflect a lived collection of moments without a monetary or AI informed goal, no concern for an idealized experience.

Robert Steel, Grace Coffey, and Nabil Gowdey share a similar sense of human wandering. With a renowned career in sound design and composition, Steel discovered a new form of visual expression on daily walks through his beloved neighborhood of 20 years. Alongside his careful, generous and steadfast photographic documentation of gentle and keen observations on his daily walks is a screenshot of the exact location and time of the photograph. Steel accumulated a remarkable history of his Andersonville neighborhood during the period of examination.

Coffey, an undergraduate student and essential worker throughout the pandemic, contributed five images and a confidential interview. Nabil Gowdey, who works for the Salvation Army, shared his music collaborations and faith. Holly Graff, a retired philosophy professor and Chicagoan, contributes a video from a Rogers Park protest on June 3, 2020, organized in efforts to support Black Lives Matter.

For many, the Covid-19 Pandemic produced the novel experience of shelter-in-place orders and the isolation of at-home quarantining unknown except perhaps a bout of the flu. For those affected by environmental or chronic illness, such as artist Julie Laffin, the home as a site of quarantine is not new. Her attuned eye creates photographs that crawl with textural landscapes and pattern from enlarged scale and color. The photo series depicted, “Remotely Corona,” ties to her ongoing series: “Hostage at Home.”

Before the pandemic, Kevin Simonds worked in childcare, and throughout quarantine adapted to zoom readings and songs with infants and parents. His contributions span from snapshots, diary entries, and a photo project recreating classic art works that has since been published in a collection of re-enactments that has been published in “Off the Walls,” Getty Publications, 2020. Simonds struggled adapting to a less sociable life and bonded over the effort of creating the photo project with his roommate.

Mat Rappaport, a prodigious and dedicated itinerant educator, artist and researcher, contributed photographs with location coordinates, an excel spreadsheet, and proof of his life through observations, plans and sustained productivity. Whiskey on the rocks sits next to an early-quarantine sourdough starter. In his personal description, Rappaport defined home and his relationships with his two teenage daughters as life in near isolation while his partner underwent aggressive treatment for cancer.

Artist Matthew Owens found new ways to continue his art practice after losing his job at the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago. For over a decade Owens has created devices for zoo animals that enrich their movement and engagement within their environment. Searching for solutions within new versions of captivity during isolation, Owens birthed the Lockdown Puppet Theater from his second-floor window. He continues to perform weekly to neighbors. He has garnered attention from local news and a wide-spread Chicago audience, animating dozens of puppets he made beginning during the Chicago shelter-in-place order.

Robert Weiss collaborated with Dolores Wilber to document a photographic series of meals prepared in lockdown, watercolor paintings, and the changes fueled by George Floyd’s murder and the pandemic around their Wicker Park home and in rural Michigan. Weiss provides contributions spanning from March 2020 to June 2021. Full of color and life, Weiss mourns the impact of the pandemic and finds new ways to traverse the landscapes surrounding him. These offerings reflect the changes in daily existence amid the COVID-19 propelled dissolution of life once known.

Also investigating his interaction with the natural world, but thorough woodworking, artist Terrence Karpowicz shares his works-in-progress. Modular and unpainted, the works seem to be informed by an understanding of machine design, architecture, and cognitive play with environmental forms. Karpowicz’s bio reads: “In 1975, [Karpowicz] was awarded a Fulbright-Hays scholarship to the United Kingdom to serve as apprentice to the sole millwright for the government’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. There he learned the ancient techniques and craftsmanship of watermill and windmill construction and preservation.” In a number of the images taken in his studio, a wooden symbol of a human provides a scale comparison beside a model of his piece, in a way that is both humbling and captivating with tension.

Philip Bradley’s contribution draws from his cinematic practice as an editor and filmmaker. Bradley’s images convey movement through proximity, revealing quiet details within an illuminated city landscape. Experienced with music videos and various filmmaking genres, Bradley makes note of the idea of the “classic, carefree summer” in contrast to the summer of 2020.

Allen Turner hopes to incite imagination and self-reflection through a re-designed tarot-card like deck. Turner also runs an ongoing personal blog, which they share as part of their contribution to the project. “Council of Fools” contributions run from February 2012-March 2021. A more intimate analog blog, Jessica Bishop-Royse practices pages of diary writing that share thoughts on her personal and domestic life, politics, projects, staying active, and transitioning spaces during the pandemic.

Constantly exploring new writing practices, Yasmin Bashir’s astute perspective and observational notes take form in a distorted audio recording, historical dates, comparisons, and emotionally reflective journal entries. Bashir touches on anonymity and the body. Her visceral description of the violence experienced while being cat-called in the street strikes deeply at the damage and terror experienced by women in everyday life. As she pitches her voice deeper, her words flow to listeners in new forms that resist passivity and provoke a deep-rooted honesty.

Rather than finding solace in writing, Mallory Baker often finds herself tasked with a deep uneasiness when confronting a blank page. Sonic unraveling dominate her senses, informing her practice as a musician as well as her perspective on life. In a video of her in a practice room, Baker performs piano. She also shares her personal journal notes, and philosophies of language, music, and spiritual connectivity.

Also enamored with sound, Adriel Trespalacios shares journal drawings, notes, and insights into their passionate interpersonal and social worlds. Trespalacios’ marks the pages of their notebook with upset rhythms, distorted symbols and characters that dance between chaos and finding legibility amongst an era of turbulence.

There is a renewed appreciation for day-to-day beauty found within these posts, and as Mallory Baker suggests in her written word and musical contributions, there are spiritual inquiries prompted by this period of great isolation, social unrest, and concerns for the natural world.

Within these contributions are the persistence of human life amongst a cloud of sickness and shifting perception, instability and new ideas. Between 18 individuals of different ages and backgrounds in the United States, Days of Quarantine Pandemic offers efforts to share and unblock free expression and communication in an era of rapid social and technological change.

-Sam Spencer with Dolores Wilber