UNTETHERED

---

At some point during 2020 I was curled up watching the local, national, and international mortality numbers from the Covid pandemic click over into ever more frightening territory on the right side of my TV screen. As the hours passed my eyes kept drifting over to a pile of dirty socks at the foot of the couch, until I realized I had begun to make a loose association between the pile of socks and the numbers of the sick and the dying. Followed by (probably due to a shrunken hippocampus caused by solitary confinement) even more bizarre associations that flash carded their way across my mind: The Holocaust, Hiroshima, Wounded Knee, Chernobyl. 

Even after I had calmed myself down, the socks remained anthropomorphized, and I started thinking about socks as a metaphor for relationships. Socks are conceived, born, and paired off, but then are sometimes separated, lost, the remaining socks paired with a new sock or left alone in the darkness while some socks survive long enough to be worn out as a pair.

Tethered/Untethered is a series of paintings dealing with our relationship to isolation and the disconnection, the falling away, during long periods of stasis. With socks.