Todd Lambrix

When the pandemic began, my art making practice shifted as I am sure many other artists did. I had been collecting cabinet cards with the intention of drawing or painting on them but had not begun the project yet. With kids learning remotely, Zoom meetings constantly on the calendar and the household chores magnified by an exponent with everyone being home, my studio time was severely limited. The cards and the immediacy of reacting to them and drawing on them was the perfect answer. I realized that many of these people lived through a similar pandemic during the Spanish flu. I wondered how they responded to their own personal protective equipment, distancing and worrying about how life would go on.

In many of these images, my responses were often fueled by the necessities of the pandemic coupled with a connection of sorts to the person I was seeing in the photo. These works seemed to allow me some kind of strange externalization of my own fears, frustrations and avoidances.

One realization that I have made through this and thus worked it into the images and what I was drawing was the fact that historically the cards themselves were often displayed in a cabinet alongside curiosities and conversation pieces. The surreal aspects of what those cabinets housed and how they somewhat functioned as portraits of those who curated them crept into the work. The singular heads in portraits were suddenly floating inside of vitrines of their own. The Victorian aesthetic that was inherent in the card began to speak to and fuel the images that were added . . . glass bell jars are an example of this.

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