Digital print, woor-burning tool, drawing / Ongoing
Tracking back on the date and curve of how coronavirus grows, it is hard to believe how we get where we are today – more than 1,400,000 people have lost their life around the world and the number is still rising by more than 10,000 daily. The number is getting so large that it becomes hard to visualize it in real life and people are desensitized, treating this number just as data. What this data can’t represent, however, is the tragedy and pain that has happened to single individuals, more than 1.2 million times. Realizing the fact that people become indifferent to what happened to others urged me to make this project. The artsit wants to make the work as a way to memorialize these people as not just numbers but as individuals. She also wants to use the work to visualize the massive number so that it can remind people of our precarious reality.
On each sheet of paper, she has printed out the number “1” 3,384 times. Each “1” represents a person who lost their life because of Covid-19. She has printed out enough of these pages to equal the number of lives lost to date and have dated the pages with the total daily death cases around the world since January 21. She is using a wood-burning tool, to markeach printed number on each sheet of paper, one at a time. When the tool heats up and burns the paper, it leaves a scar on each “1”. She also invites audiences to participate in the counting and marking process, to experience this work, and so that others might have a space and short period of time to concentrate on the loss of life caused by Covid-19.
Special thanks to Delanie Jenkins for providing the wood-burning tool for the work and for helping with coming up the installation space. Also special thanks to Kate Joranson for helping to find a potential space to install the work.
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