Quarantine Moods: Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman's drawing "Quarantine Moods," (2020)  posted on Gladstone Gallery's Instagram  offers a thoroughly brilliant, heart-breaking, and hilarious map of the internal psychic topography of being confined to quarters during Shelter in Place. Over a spiral, vanishing inward to a central singularity, are imprinted all the emotions that buffet us during our lonely sentence of indeterminate length: Dreading, Resentful, Seething, Reckless, etc..Around the outer circle, like sixteen hours ticking away on the clock of an endless day under solitary confinement, are sixteen snapshots of the artist's (or anyone's) increasingly desperate, anxious thoughts under Lockdown. My favorite include: "Google anxiously at all hours to check in on Fauci," "Get absolutely nothing done although you have nothing else to do and are in athletic apparel."  Thank you, Amy Sillman,  for reminding us what a great gift a work of art can be: laughing, and weeping with a shock of recognition over this image of intense loneliness, we are lifted out of ourselves, and miraculously, feel a good deal less lonely. For a moment at least, Sillman has opened the door of our prison cell, and released us into the delightful fellowship of knowing we are, though physically isolated, hardly alone. We may not yet be free, but at least we've had a a marvelous, circular stroll around our mental prison yard together!

Amy Sillman, Qurantine Moods, 2020