Uncertainty in the Time of the Pandemic

I remember the early days of the pandemic.

I was on lockdown for about 17 weeks and that time was spent almost entirely alone with my 4-year-old. In those early days there was still a lot of uncertainty about how COVID spreads, who is at risk, and what preventative measures are effective. The threat of death and disease seemed to hang over everything we did.

My daughter and I went for long bike rides through the vacant city. She rode her scooter through the graveyard. We crawled under chainlink fences and played ball in vacant lots.

And every morning I checked the death counts.

3,739 dead in Iran…

10,372 in the United States…

21 in Luxembourg…

It was a strange kind of calculus: here is the figure; here is how many dead today; tomorrow there will be more.

This image was composed during that death-haunted time. The rat is a reference to the role that animal (ostensibly) played in spreading the black death. The dried roses refer to the popular plague-themed nursery rhyme "ring around the rosie". The bone and rotten tomatoes are reminders that all things are transient. And everything in the composition is meant to suggest instability, uncertainty. The roses and baby rats are dangerously close to the edge of the table. The bone and the rat are both precariously places; at any moment they might slide off the table and into the darkness beyond the frame.