During the Last Great Visitation

Quality Results

During the Last Great Visitation, 2020

Osculator was scheduled to be presented in April 2020 during Failure(s) to Comply: practices of refusal, insubordination, and disruption, the Anthropology Graduate Conference at The New School for Social Research in New York. Unfortunately due to concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was canceled (rightly so considering the nature of the piece). We reconfigured the project digitally by transforming photographs of the ceramic pieces into augmented reality lenses, reminiscent of PPE facemasks. With these new pieces, we were contemplating the impact of the COVID-19 disease on us as artists and our work by incorporating pandemic-related imagery.

In Osculator, we were breathing into one another’s mouths as a test of intimacy. Now breathing itself is terrifying. We used to hug, now only elbows. Practices that once facilitated intimacy are now a relic of a by-gone era that our digital masks recall.