Everyday Recently
By Laura Brown, MFA
Washington, USA
Laura is an interdisciplinary artist and a behavioral arts specialist living on the coast of Washington, US. Her training background includes a year of art therapy graduate courses at New York University after receiving her MFA from California Institute for the Arts.
I live on the coast of Washington, and on February 1st, I started a daily practice of going to my local beach every day for a month, and photographing it at the same time, and same spot. It was about taking the time to look at something from the same perspective every day at the same time. First I went between 9 and 10 in the morning, and then at sunset. It began as a way to document the changes on the beach, but than it expanded. I have a strong relationship to nature which has been deepened by this global crisis. Although I'm an interdisciplinary artist, photography is the medium I went to first. The quarantine is not dissimilar to my daily life as an introvert, in terms of isolation and social distancing, but there's now a heightened sense of anxiety and depression because it's affecting so many other people.
On March 24, when our quarantine started, I had to move out of my trailer in the state park I was living in/working at called Cape Disappointment, and rent a beach cabin further up the Peninsula. My daily photographic practice has now deepened to become about being in the same place everyday at the same time, as a way to provide structure, stability, calm, hope. I've noticed it sometimes feels like I'm in 'clean' nature vs. 'unclean' nature, which is the virus. Being in nature, devoid of other people, feels different now. These kinds changes in the world feel important to document through my art practice. I've been organizing the images for online presentation on my website, senseofplace LAB, an on-going public art platform since 2008 in San Francisco. I'm presently interested how these images are seen collectively, so they are arranged very tightly together as a composite of each month. This grid has come to represent other aspects of our life now: a cartoon, a calendar, the Zoom format of our human interactions.
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