Social media users have been sharing images online that claim bill H.R. 6666, introduced by Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush and also known as the COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act, will allow the government to forcibly enter homes, test and remove family members, including children, to be taken into quarantine. This has been claimed to be false however people have been confined to their homes and fears of the virus entering people’s homes physically and psychologically through fake news is a reality.
This body of work H.R 6666 explores what it is to be a human being in these times of Covid-19 and what we feel in a time our sense of freedom has been constrained. The photographic sets I construct in this series are a reaction to people’s stories that people don’t see everyday, love, loss, the ambivalence, the ambiguity, and the silences that lie beneath the surface.
The starting point of the project is a call out or messages online to members of the public, this dialogue informs the sets I construct. These photographs have an emotional complexity that feels unsettling at times. Unfinished stories becoming unveiled. I want to show the hardships and joys people don’t speak of. The hidden things that are beyond words, to show the stories people don’t always speak of.
I want to create interior and exterior landscapes that reflect our current unprecedented restrictions where even our own homes as a place of safety and familiarity is made uncertain. This project is something beyond social media, Internet searches, this is a real, raw, unflinching true stories that pushes the limits of perception and the human condition.
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