Facing the Unknown

Imagination in the Time of Pandemic

Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY, Jan 8–Apr 3, 2021

Lily Morris, Millicent Young, Osi Audu, Martina Angela Müller, Patrick Stolfo, Laura Summer, Elmer Orobio & Richard Neal

The pandemic with its great loss of life has created a new inner and outer environment: mourning those we have lost; disappearance of livelihoods, homes, and close interactions with others. Great shortcomings in our society have been uncovered. We have been seismically shifted into isolation and experience a stymied cultural life that usually sustains our well-being.

Some families have also spent more time with each other, people have drawn more within, found sustenance turning to meditation, nature, reading and artistic pursuits, turning pandemic into a vessel for positive change.

How are artists finding a way to grow through these times of isolation, uncertainty, death and new perceptions of our social connections and issues? Are there channels of light that have opened up? Wings of hope that lift us out and above the current situation for a distanced survey?

The work in this show, created in 2020, allows for a glimpse into the imaginative process of the artists and how it serves as a much-needed refuge within which to weave a new web of spiritual, inner and outer connection.