It's All Fun
And—

The pandemic has rippled into nearly every space within our lives, expanding the virtual realms we inhabit and the duration for which we inhabit them, while recontextualizing shared intimacies in our daily life. In the same interaction, I can get a deeply personal glimpse into someone’s home living space through a video call, while abruptly confronting the fact that I had all but forgotten what their face looked like outside of a mask. 

 

Masks semiotically have become blended with how we recognize others outside of private spaces. The materials I have used and referenced throughout this exhibition conflate these distinctions between public and private interactions—such as a spatially intimate game like Twister being composed of social distancing stickers—examining the spaces in which we are either recognized with or without masks and which objects surround us in each context to rhetorically construct said spaces.

 

The title of the exhibition reflects the pandemic’s interruption—of time, of space, of norm—as if the inner dialogue of the thought “It’s all fun and games” was itself interrupted, taken from the mouth and left silently within the internal space of implication. Games thematically punctuate the concepts addressed within this exhibition, as games are rhetorically associated with social interaction, shared spaces, and domestic nostalgia. Further, games function as micro-systems in which we do not make, but do agree to play by the rules, even though the rules often cater to some and blatantly exclude others. Games carry with them a risk-free sense of frivolity that I have satirically employed here in examination of how people chose to treat one another during the pandemic, wherein risks and privileges were quite tangible. 

 

Physical spaces have altered—and maybe for some, this was merely a game that is nearly won—but for others, much has been lost, and physical space itself will always remain a bit more distant. All the while, our empathetic spaces have dwindled, and we see less of ourselves in one another, occupying a smaller field of a common ground, constricted more still by our now more visibly broken systems.

 

The game is rigged.