This video is titled “Sketching,” and it is constructed entirely out of still images of my sketchbook from Bangalore, India. Drawing allowed me to experience a particular kind of mobility while I was in that in that city: the ability to cross social (as well as cultural and linguistic) differences. My study abroad program had provided me with the freedom to move across physical spaces, but it was the act of public sketching that gifted me the rich social experiences that I now fondly recollect. Pen and paper in hand, I wandered around Bangalore to capture buildings, plants, animals, and, most importantly, people. I drew people on buses, streets, and in restaurants, sharing smiles with them if we happened to make eye contact and passing them my sketchbook if I sensed curiosity. In that unfamiliar city, my sketches became my primary means of cultivating new relationships.
Though I had visions of continuing this exercise in Seattle before I left India, the spread of COVID-19 in the US and the accompanying stay-at-home orders have forced me to develop a different relationship to drawing. The experience of quarantine has had a dramatic impact on my understanding of time and social mobility. Though I know in my head that the forward momentum of time remains constant, remaining isolated from others in my studio apartment has rendered this movement more or less illegible to me. It is this sense of temporal-social alienation – of motionless motion – that has led me to create a video piece out of still images. I have continued producing new sketches under quarantine, but the lack of social spaces to produce them in has led to a de-emphasis on faces or names. In this new day-to-day reality of phone call visits and Zoom meetings, commercial household goods and their accompanying labels have taken center stage in my work. The sketch at the end of the video is an example of this artistic shift. Though my 2020 drawings do feel colder and more impersonal in comparison to the warm spontaneity of my earlier pieces, it feels right that my sketchbook reflects my current emotional experiences; this continuity, at least, has helped me regain a sense of normalcy. At a time when my mobility has been restricted and my understanding of time has lost all sense of fluidity, creating emotionally honest art has given me a way to cope.
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