The Entropy Cliché By A.R. Keiner

THE

ENTROPY CLICHÉ A. R. K E I N E R

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THE ENTROPY CLICHÉ

A Thesis Report submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF FINE ART in FINE ART

by Alexis Roberts Keiner, San Francisco, California Spring 2020

Copyright by Alexis Roberts Keiner 2020

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CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read THE ENTROPY CLICHÉ by ALEXIS ROBERTS KEINER, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Art: Fine Arts at San Francisco State University.

Name of the professor, Choose degree Click to choose the faculty rank

Name of the professor, Choose degree Click to choose the faculty rank

Name of the professor, Choose degree Click to choose the faculty rank

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PROLOGUE: Abstract + Artist Statement

Abstract This report examines the thesis exhibition of Alexis Roberts Keiner in spring of 2020. This collection of large-scale paintings, drawings, archives, and artists books examining both poetic and narrative expressions of mourning. The thesis work itself is built upon a bifurcated research structure: a scorebased process of making with an emphasis on the physicality of the maker and viewer, and a thematic representation of grief and bereavement. The Entropy Cliché constructs a narrative of life in prolonged mourning after the death of a child.

Presented in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the thesis work is not presented in a gallery but takes advantage of the publication as site in print, zine, social media, and URL. The work’s removal from the physical gallery space into digital ephemera deeply parallels the contemporary grief experience in which our images exist not in the physical, but as digital ghosts of themselves.

Artist Statement As an interdisciplinary artist, my work is concerned with two primary entities: the mark and the act of trapping time loss, grief, and mourning.

This quickly enters into the topics we avoid in polite conversations. My work has addressed the search for joy in sex during recovery from violence, the inner workings of a marriage, a womxn’s search for identity in mourning, the death of children. These are taboo conversational topics in society; subjects best left for a therapist. These are also the things that Art, at its best, is really good at.

The Entropy Cliché considers grief and mourning stemming from the death of my son.

All works look to simulate the physicality of loss either through process, scale, or viewing modality.

The small paintings take fragments from past projects and alter them to reflect either before or after the death of my son. The works on paper are oil paintings of imagined and internal landscape on top of torn segments from previous bodies of work. The two original bodies of work, Coastal Journal watercolor landscapes drawings made between 2000-2010 and 100 Selfies, one hundred self-portrait drawings from Fall 2015 are torn into small sections and forced into conversation with the new imagery in oil.

The work is often completed after months, years, sometimes decades of dormancy. The formal aspect has its foundation in drawing, painting, and sculpture. The process is additionally rooted in choreographic practice and movement scores, stemming from my early life as a dancer. The score, established at the offset of a piece, either dictates my movements or a particular choreography I imagine for the viewer, manipulating my body or theirs in the making or viewing of the work respectively.

Other objects are used in a similar way: an object/relic from the past re-worked, recontextualized.

This use of poetics often pushes the work into abstraction. The final works are paintings, books, drawings, installations, or videos. The seemingly disparate physical manifestations of the work are bound together by process and theme. This diverse practice is also meant to reiterate that none of us, not even womxn who make work about grief, are a single story.

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The Entropy Cliché

Table of Contents PROLOGUE: Abstract + Artist Statement

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Abstract

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Artist Statement

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Table of Contents

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PART 1: BEFORE

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A Note about Death: Physicalists vs. Dualists

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A Note about Loss vs. Grief

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A Note about my Community and Grief: This is not the Kübler-Ross Model

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A Note about Layers of Mourning: Fennel vs. Onion

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A Note about Score

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A Note about Citation during a Pandemic: Reading Lists and Approximations

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PART TWO: THE WORK LOSS of SELF: The Entropy Cliché, Shipwrecks, and Work in Process The Entropy Cliché

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Shipwrecks

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Work in Process (in an effort to trap time)

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GRIEVING the MOTHER, GRIEVING my SON: Fragments

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Fragments: The First Mile Is the Hardest (portrait of mom)/

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Fragments: The Body and the Ocean

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LOSS of the NOW: Acoustic Energy Distribution of Chorus Howls

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COLLECTIVE GRIEVING: Nice to Meet You Madame President: Archive of the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019 PART 3: IMAGES Image 01: Work in Process (in an effort to trap time), 2020, Video Still,

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Images 02-07: The Entropy Cliché and Shipwrecks, 2019, oil on watercolor/ink selfie on paper 17 Image 06: Shipwreck, 2019, oil on 2014 ink selfie on paper, 22”x30” (dimensions approximate) 18 Image 07: terrestrial site, 2019, oil on 2014 ink selfie, 22”x30” (dimensions approximate)

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Fragments: The Body and The Ocean, 2020 acrylic on canvas

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Fragments: The First Mile Is the Hardest (portrait of mom), 2020, acrylic on canvas 20 Image 15: Acoustic Energy Distribution of Chorus Howls, 2020, mixed media on panel, 96”x144”

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Image 16: Nice to Meet You, Madame President: Archive from the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019, 2020 (DETAIL) 22 Image 18: Nice to Meet You, Madame President: Archive from the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019, 2020 23 Image 17: Nice to Meet You, Madame President: Archive from the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019, 2020 24 PART 4: COVID Diary COVID DIARY

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MARCH 15, 2020

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MARCH 17, 2020

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MARCH 20, 2020, before dawn

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MARCH 20, 2020, late evening

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MARCH 21, 2020

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MARCH 24, 2020

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APRIL 1, 2020

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TUESDAY APRIL 7, 2020

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APRIL 9, 2020

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APRIL 10, 2020

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APRIL 13, 2020

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April 15, 2020

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APRIL 16, 2020

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APRIL 17, 2020

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APRIL 18, 2020

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APRIL 18, 2020 11pm

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PART 5: Acknowledgements

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PART 6: References/ Reading List *

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PART 1: BEFORE On the morning of August 14, 2012, I dropped my newly four-year-old daughter and nine-week-old son off at my neighborhood day care before heading to work. At drop off, there was a back and forth with the daycare proprietor as to whether or not she had enough staff for the day. I offered to bring my son to work with me. After assuring me it was fine, I said goodbye to the children and left to see my client.

Two hours later, I received a text alerting me of a “911 Emergency.” During this otherwise uneventful day at day care, my healthy, 14-pound baby boy stopped breathing and died.

My son’s death shook all corners of my life. Like artists such as Alice Neel, Kathe Kollwitz, Rebecca Campbell, Mary Frank, Barbara Hepworth, and Frida Kahlo, artists who also experienced and made work about the death of a child, my life and artistic practice would be forever altered.

A Note about Death: Physicalists vs. Dualists I am what philosopher and ethicist Shelly Kagan calls a Physicalist.

In Kagan’s 2012 book Death (Yale University Press), he breaks up people into two groups when considering death and dying: physicalists and dualists. Physicalists believe the body and the mind are one; when the body dies, so does the mind. Dualists believe in a body and a soul; when the body dies, the soul continues on into the afterlife. I make no judgement for either belief system. In my personal experience as well as my observations of other people after the death of a child, I do not think much reason is involved in which belief system a person comes to naturally. I do think bereavement brings clarity to which side of this binary a person sits. I do believe people in the throes of grief deserve comfort where they can find it and deserve space free of judgement to do so.

Though I reserve the right to remain opaque on certain subjects, the reader deserves transparency regarding my position on this issue.

A Note about Loss vs. Grief Loss and Grief. These words are often used as synonyms. Yet “loss” is a broad term that marks a range of absences. Loss can describe many situations in addition to the common use of the word “loss” as a euphemism for death. Loss can also be applied to regret or repercussions of a choice, a missed opportunity, or a longing.

“Grief “more adequately gets assigned to the active time of mourning. Grief is sudden, complex, and overwhelming. Grief also lingers.

Loss as a thing. Grief as an action.

When discussing the death of a child with other bereaved parents, the circumstances of the child’s death may be wildly different: violence, addiction, negligence, illness, disease, and accident.

Circumstances of death are rife with different degrees of loss. But even within widely varying circumstances of death, the “crazy” or the madness of grief can be hauntingly similar. Time bends.

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Walls crash inward. It is the darkness. Loss is the baseball bat. Grief is the sudden crack of the skull and shock of pain as the bat hits your head.

A Note about my Community and Grief: This is not the Kübler-Ross Model This visceral description and experience of grief is in contrast to the popular understanding of the Kübler-Ross model, more commonly known as the Five Stages of Grief®. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross was an American-Swiss psychiatrist whose observations of dying patients grieving one's own death at end of life was originally published in On Death and Dying, 1969. The five stages are denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance (or despair). Author David Kessler co-wrote a book with Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving that applies the model to other types of loss including the death of a loved one.

While I support bringing death and grief into conversation as much as possible, I have met scores of non-bereaved people who believe that my grief (and the grief of other parents) should fit tidily in this model. In the last almost 8 years, I have not met a bereaved parent who finds the "Five Stages of Grief" helpful or applicable to their own process. It is common for people who have not experienced grief first-hand (or even read the model in its entirety) to accept the model as a road map. There is a misconception and an expectation that once a bereaved parent “gets over” the five stages of grief all will be well in the world. There is also a misconception that acute grief is completely devoid of the other aspects that make us human and therefore are inappropriate during mourning: sexual desire, gallows humor, the drive to have children, and for the artist, an insatiable need to make or not make.

Let me be clear, my problem is not with the work of Kübler-Ross or Kessler, but with the oversimplification of the model pervasive in popular culture. On numerous occasion I've been asked by well-meaning strangers what stage of grief I am “on.”

Grieving the death of a child is a non-linear, semi-permeable, and layered process not a step based protocol built by Bill W.1 What stage of grief am I on?

My standard reply to this question is “center.”

A Note about Layers of Mourning: Fennel vs. Onion Layers of mourning emerge across my oeuvre, sitting tightly together. Not like an onion where the concentric spherical scales hold tight to the next sphere within, but like a bulb of fennel, where each section holds the next and gives space to the stalk from which more stalks can grow and flower. Each layer is tough. Every part has a use, a fragrance, a color. This layering appears in the work. For example, in my painting Shipwrecks, loss appears as the ink wash and marks of a fragmented self-portrait; grief appears in the gesture of a broken tree, a tempest on the horizon, movement of color in space– layered together mourning is revealed as both ephemeral and weighted. Grief sits between the layers of paint.

A Note about Score As long as I can remember, I’ve maintained an art practice: painting, drawing, performance, choreography, sculpture. Although it’s been 15 years since my last performance as a dancer, the 1

Founder of 12 step program Alcoholics Anonymous

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knowledge and use of “score” in my work has become increasingly important. In dance a score can be used as an intention or map for a given piece. Applied to my work today, scores both dictate my movement in the making of the work and the use of score is evident in the way the work is meant to be viewed in the gallery. Viewers are meant to stand close, bend down, open boxes, leaf through books, and hunch over small sculpture.

A Note about Citation during a Pandemic: Reading Lists and Approximations I am completing this thesis report under Los Angeles’ Safer at Home ordinance while all of San Francisco in under a Shelter in Place order. I do not have access to libraries, physical books, museum collections, the full texts, many of my sketchbooks and notes, or any of the individual art works discussed in this report.

With the permission of my department, in lieu a complete annotated bibliography, I have included a complete reading and viewing list in the references section. All dimensions that are approximate are noted with an Asterix.

In what follows, I will walk you through the gallery space, piece by piece.

Before we begin, please remove page 15 of this report and assemble the paper gallery as instructed so you can follow along. A magnifying glass will be useful to allow you to enter the space.

PART TWO: THE WORK

LOSS of SELF: The Entropy Cliché, Shipwrecks, and Work in Process Walk into the gallery. It has white walls and a blonde wood floor. It is almost twice as long as it is wide.2 On the left is a large wall with standard vinyl didactic and a table with a visitor’s book. This is where we will begin.

The Entropy Cliché Installed on a white wall beneath the show title are four small oil paintings on heavy paper, each with a deckled edge. Each painting depicts a dry and worn out abstraction in the foreground, colorful, and heavy. Gestural marks are dead trees, dry earth, upturned roots. The paint itself bears evidence of cracking. In the background, as transparent as the foreground is opaque, sits a partially obstructed rectangle. This drawn area in watercolor functions as a painting within a painting. It is evocative of a set in the theatre, as if players had come to this dead forest, set up for their performance, and then abandoned it suddenly, leaving the backdrop in the woods to be stumbled upon.

This watercolor backdrop is exactly that. Fragments of drawings made between 2000 and 2011 were torn from their original compositions and repurposed as a painting surface. Each full-size representational watercolor in the original body of work was made from observation: landscapes, corner still-lifes in my apartment. Many of the drawings were made while visiting artist, writer and 2

Our paper model is wider to allow you to see the smaller images more clearly.

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educator Diana R. Tillion in Halibut Cove, Alaska.3 Torn apart carefully, but without a measuring or cutting tool, the drawings became unprimed surfaces for the new imagery in oil.

Left unprimed, the heavy weight 400lbs paper begins to have a conversation with the oil paint that is out of my control. The paper fibers pull the oil from the paint, prematurely cracking the paint’s skin. Halos of safflower oil begin to appear over time.

This is the conversation I am interested in.

It examines the before and after. Before my son’s birth. Before his death. The visitation after so much time had passed. The loss of the future child that will never be. This is a conversation between my work within my work that spans decades. The reaction of the oil on the paper mirrors the acceleration of aging due to the grieving process. The loss of one kind of beauty for another.

The loss of time.

Shipwrecks Just past the small works and closer to the floor are four more paintings. Kneel down and get close.

The oil paintings in cobalts and mauve depict the decimation of vessels after a storm. Painted on fragments of self-portraits made in 2014, each next new intervention in oil leaves space for the original image. In a three-month period, shortly after the birth of my third child in 2013, I drew one hundred self-portraits ranging in size from 22”x30” to 70”x40”. 100 Selfies was a search for identity in the fog of grief. Like the small and brighter works in the Entropy Cliché, the score for the Shipwrecks is the same; drawings were selected, folded, torn, and left unprimed. As I approached each fragment of my figure, I re-oriented the work until the figure disappeared and the landscape emerged. From this new view of old work, the painting process would begin. Different from the self-cannibalism collages of Lee Krasner, I am not destroying pieces I can’t stand. I’m rebirthing some of the most beautiful work I’ve made into this conversation.

Work in Process (in an effort to trap time) Now stand up and take a look behind you. On two sides of a white 3-sided 8’x4’x’4 cubicle, straddling the edge is a black and white video projection. This seven-minute video animation repeats every twenty minutes.

The single channel video in high contrast black and white opens on an empty gallery space. Gray floor. White walls on the left and right. The wall at the back center is divided horizontally. Half white. Half black. The point of view is a wide angle, one-point perspective focused on the back wall.

On the floor toward the back of the room is a roll of canvas.

I walk into the frame. Black clothes. Black Hair. Skin that sways between gray, white, and whiter depending on what I am standing in front of: the white, black, or gray. A value study in simultaneous contrast. I unroll the canvas to reveal a 9’x 12’ painting. I walk to the back of the gallery, kneel at the edge of the painting, and proceed without measuring to cut the painting in half 3

Diana R. Tillion (1924-2010). I studied observational drawing and painting of the subarctic landscape with Ms. Tillion from 1999-2009 from her studio in Kachemak Bay. This mentorship in my twenties was in lieu of the graduate school experience. She not only taught me volumes about observational methods, she also was a role model in grief.

In 1983 she lost her granddaughter and her home in a house fire. She taught me about the risk/benefit of being open.

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revealing a second painting below. The process repeats. I then cut the painting into quarters and repeat on the second painting. The first half of the score for the smaller works (i.e., Shipwrecks) applied to the larger work.

My movements are pedestrian and matter of fact. The black and white is a not only a nod to my love of drawing, but to my history as a modern dancer. The nod is as much to the archive of modern dance in America and the subsequent images and writing that emerged during that era.

GRIEVING the MOTHER, GRIEVING my SON: Fragments Walk past the projection and the cubicle and you will find yourself between two large walls of paintings in conversation. Sit on the bench in the center or walk back and forth from painting to painting. On your left and right are eight roughly 53”x70” paintings on canvas collectively titled Fragments; these works are the result of the cuts made in Work in Process. The original compositions came from a two-pronged question: formal on one side, emotional on the other.

Fragments: The First Mile Is the Hardest (portrait of mom)/ Fragments: The Body and the Ocean On your left, repetition of line in each painting pushes the eye from one painting to the next in bright oranges, muted reds, soft blues, and darkest browns. This is Fragments: The First Mile Is the Hardest (portrait of mom). On your right, repetition of line in each painting pushes the eye from one painting to the next in analogous green, blues, and violets. This is Fragments: The Body and the Ocean. Each painting captures my repeated movements in the making of the work as a meditation on two different sensations of grief: the sensation of being cut down and rooting into the earth that can happen simultaneously, and the sudden crash of grief as an invisible tsunami of sadness covers the body.

When the original two 108”x144” paintings were completed in 2019, I wrote: 1) What happens at scale when darkest, coolest darks run through the center, and palest warms hold the horizontal top and bottom of the picture plane? As painting often requires improvisation, this requires discipline to stay the course with the original question. The First Mile Is the Hardest (portrait of mom) pulls a visual vocabulary from vascular systems, dendrites, spruce roots, and coal seams... an abstracted portrait of my stroke-suffering, treeloving, geologist mother.

2) How to depict the crashing devastation of grief, but leave the painting’s story open enough that anyone can fall into it with their own narrative? What happens if the darkest darks are set on the edges of the picture plane? How do horizontal bands that move from darkest, lightest, to medium squeeze or expand the center of the image at scale? What does the value study look like in analogous color on a neutral ground? I allowed the figure to come in and out of the composition, drowning in tree forms. When is the figure too much? How can a tree form turn to water and back again?

Mourning is occupied by commemorations and milestones of loss and grief. The first three months, the first holiday, the first 1000 days, birthdays, death anniversaries. Roland Barthes in Mourning

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Diary4 fears the impending anniversary of his mother’s death, “I fear, increasingly, as if on this day (October 25) she will have to die a second time.” A freehand cutting of these two large works on canvas created Fragments (documented in Work in Process). The day I completed Fragments by quartering the paintings is significant. It was made on my eldest child’s half birthday, one day before the seven-and-a-half year anniversary of my son’s death. Cutting Fragments occurred one year after they were completed in their first form. One year is also the distance in time between the death of my son and the birth of my third child.

Sitting in relation to one another, the eight Fragments share the same birth and process while also vibrating off one another as individual works.

LOSS of the NOW: Acoustic Energy Distribution of Chorus Howls Face the farthest wall of the gallery; there is a small table and a bench in front of a large painting.

On the table is a collection of zines, a larger artists book chronicling the making of this show, and this very report. Have a seat but face the wall in front of you. Set a timer for seven minutes.

The wall holds a large-scale 96”x144” brightly colored and gestural mixed media painting on wooden panel. Acoustic Energy Distribution of Chorus Howls is installed with evidence of the artist’s studio at its feet. Bookending the piece on the left is a lavender step ladder. On the right, a paint splattered folded oblong table leans against the wall. Scattered on the floor between the two objects are various items of the creative process: a chocolate tin, a coffee mug, a paint brush, a shipping tube, a translation of Brecht’s A Worker Reads History, and a pencil sharpened to the nub.5 The painting itself is made by using a movement vocabulary based on how the body moves through the forest in winter. By the enforced repetition of these movements while applying line to the panel, a topography emerges. This is not a painting of a specific landscape, but a painting of how the body moves through a specific landscape. This is not a painting of how the snow looks, but how it feels.

“And what of Loss?” you wonder, peering into marks made with increasing velocity. Each line is a breath. This painting is the longing for and anticipation of joy, the longing for time together. The ‘wish I could be with you now’ cruising at top speed in the ups and downs between trees. This painting is the drop everything moment. This painting is the backdrop left in the woods by the players.

COLLECTIVE GRIEVING: Nice to Meet You Madame President: Archive of the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019 As you turn to walk out of the gallery, you suddenly see the inside of the cubicle. Here, within an 8’x4’x4’ rectangular U with natural wood siding and a hanging fluorescent light is the archive of the Dead Baby Club. Before you enter, take a moment to consider who this work is for. It is a hybrid: artwork sculpture and true archive of grieving families. It could be for you or for someone you know.

In cinema, we are accustomed to the narrative. We go to the cinema to hear stories, feel feelings.

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Morning Diary, Roland Barthes a posthumously published collection of his notes surrounding his grief for his mother.

5 Brecht, Bertolt A Worker Reads History, 1936

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We don’t have that expectation of the gallery. This work gives the gallery permission to occupy that space. In short, this is not Robert Morris’ Card File, 1962.

You step in just far enough so the shallow walls work like blinders, blocking the view of the paintings around you. Installed on the wooden wall to your left are dozens of Instax photographs documenting every mundane object and sacred relic of a child’s life. These physical photographs of physical things serve as proof of existence. Directly in front of you on a small table next to a box of Kleenex are many books, boxes. Each photograph, each item, captures an underlying drive in the work to pull memories out of the digital and make them physical. This is exemplified by a stack of small drawings made directly from digital images of my son.

The archive contains over 1000 individual pieces of ephemera. It holds the sums of my research.

From the information about artists who survived the death of a child to non-linear narratives of grieving, images of my advocacy, and vellum copies of drawings made in pediatric hospice, here is the evidence of social practice within my built community of bereaved families.

At its most simple, the archive explores the before and the after. Here were our families before our children died and here they are after. Here is a physical object that existed before my son died and here it is after. Yet what is captured in Nice to Meet You... is less linear. The boxes hold Polaroids, letters, small drawings, numerous book projects, photographs of my partner and I before and after my son’s death.

On the edge of the viewing table, there is a black archive box. Put on a pair of the disposable gloves provided and open the box. Inside are two 7”x5.5”x3” stacks of drawings bundled in twine.

Untie this and see a collection of drawings in sepia tone octopus ink and washes on 400lbs paper.

Each drawing is of my son sourced from a digital photograph that I do not have physical access to (gr). This series of drawings strives to bring the digital ephemera of light and pixels into the physical world. All the drawings are made in the cool sepia of octopus ink.

Open the Rolodex. Hear the click and slide of the vintage steel. Place your hands on the cool hard plastic wheels on either side and turn them until you come to the section labeled “ADVICE I GIVE TO THE NEWLY BEREAVED.” Hear the cards flip through. In this rolodex, bits and pieces of this experience of mourning, grief, and loss are hand typed on vellum, and glued to each card. In this rolodex, small Instax photos of a life in grief are filed intermittently between the cards. Images of onesie cut in half by paramedics, an unmade bed, advice and devastations are alphabetized and categorized like a miniature filing system..

For example, the first section, “ADVICE I GIVE TO THE NEWLY BEREAVED” contains cards in which content typical to a Rolodex card is replaced by recognition of what parents can expect immediately after the death of a child. “Hold on. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”

In some cases, as in the “Let it be hard” cards, a single sentiment takes up multiple cards.

“Let it be hard.”

“Let it be really fucking hard” “Be a mess” “And let your friend and your family and your community scoop you up off the floor.”

On other cards, the advice is simpler and more difficult to attain: “Wake up. Make Coffee”

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30 other sections including “BOOKS ON GRIEF (HELPFUL)” and “BOOKS ON GRIEF (NOT HELPFUL),” and “MISSPELLINGS OF MY CHILDREN’S NAMES” round out this peek into bereavement.

The final chapter, “WHAT NOT TO SAY” was originally conceived as a comic book titled “What Not to Say: Volume One” (also in the archive). The original text in the comic collection of things said to me after the death of my son by clients at the salon where I work. Very simple lined Illustrations show a pregnant version of myself doing blow dries and haircuts as well mean and blank faced clients inform me that should now plan on getting divorced or gasp “What on earth was a nine-week-old baby doing at day care??”” The illustrations add humor to these otherwise awful situations. By removing the illustrations, the words are left independent.

A card blankly states: “YOUR OLDER GIRL WASN’T REALLY ATTACHED, WAS SHE? I MEAN, HOW CLOSE CAN YOU REALLY GET TO A BABY IN NINE WEEKS?” The industrial steel lid of the rolodex is meant to stay closed until the viewer is ready to explore its contents. Slide open the cool metal and the viewer can flip through and read every word.

As you are reading the words, notice how your posture changes, how you hunch over or stiffen up depending on the words, images. Like the nessicary compartmentalization when exploring the grief of others, the rolodex can be closed at any point when it gets to be too much, and one needs to move on.

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PART 3: IMAGES

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Image 01: Work in Process (in an effort to trap time), 2020, Video Still,

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Images 02-07: The Entropy ClichĂŠ and Shipwrecks, 2019, oil on watercolor/ink selfie on paper

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Image 06: Shipwreck, 2019, oil on 2014 ink selfie on paper, 22�x30� (dimensions approximate)

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Image 07: terrestrial site, 2019, oil on 2014 ink selfie, 22�x30� (dimensions approximate)

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Fragments: The Body and The Ocean, 2020 acrylic on canvas dimensions variable, each segment 53”x70”

Fragments: The First Mile Is the Hardest (portrait of mom), 2020, acrylic on canvas dimensions variable, each segment 53”x70” ,

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Image 15: Acoustic Energy Distribution of Chorus Howls, 2020, mixed media on panel, 96”x144”

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Image 16: Nice to Meet You, Madame President: Archive from the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019, 2020 (DETAIL) mixed media, dimensions variable

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Image 18: Nice to Meet You, Madame President: Archive from the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019, 2020 mixed media, dimensions variable

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Image 17: Nice to Meet You, Madame President: Archive from the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019, 2020 mixed media, dimensions variable

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PART 4: COVID Diary COVID DIARY The following chapter is a collection of entries from a diary kept during the 40 days of my initial quarantine in Los Angeles County during the ‘Safer at Home’ ordinance. The entries consider the span of time from my return to Los Angeles on March 10th, to April 18th, the scheduled date of the opening of the Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition at the Fine Arts Gallery, San Francisco State University. ____________________________________________________________________________

MARCH 15, 2020 I am not supposed to be in Los Angeles.

But in the face of so many deaths just in the last month, I left San Francisco March 9th less than 24 hours after I arrived.

My practice, my studies, and my stuff in San Francisco cannot be the first priority. I got home just in time. In San Francisco there is talk of a city-wide freeze of movement to curb the spread of the virus.

Currently, I am healthy. Childhood asthma and to a lesser extent thrombophilia and vascular disorder set me firmly in the at-risk population for the disease so I am careful and diligent. As I just landed from SFO a few days ago, I’ll stay home the next 14 days to confirm I’m symptom-free. My daughters and my partner of 20 + years are healthy. We have our health. We must protect that at all costs. All the other unanswered questions about future exhibitions, reopening of society, and the return to the classroom will have to wait.

My practice absorbs and converts loss to work. All is not lost.

progress, and my cohort.

Things I am separated from due to the sudden departure from San Francisco: the sketchbooks containing my research, my studio library, my thesis notes, my sketchbooks, my paints, my sculptures, my works in

And yet I wake grateful.

Things I have: my health, my children, my partner, my home, my day planner, my functioning computer, my garage studio with enough odds and ends to keep me busy, and my cohort - now online.

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MARCH 17, 2020 It’s 7 days after I arrived home and 20 days after the article in the Bee. My paints, my typewriter, my rolodex, my zines, my 32 paintings that comprise my thesis are still in San Francisco along with my jeans, my coveralls, yards of canvas, and 22 Fabriano-brand sketchbooks and drawing supplies I purchased for my class out of pocket.

The city of Beverly Hills, citing many confirmed cases of COVID-19, closed all beauty salons earlier in the month so I am out of work. In a radical move for a community like Beverly Hills, beauty salons were not considered essential services. But don’t worry, the landlord is “still [graciously] accepting rent.”

MARCH 20, 2020, before dawn It is very possible the work in this thesis will never be seen.

At least not physically experienced by a viewer in the way originally conceptualized.

Yes, the digital images will be distributed via social media. Perhaps a catalogue will be mailed out, if San Francisco’s Shelter in Place orders are lifted and funding allows. I’ll cobble together a book exploring the work of my research. At its most ambitious, the publication will live in the Leonard Library Art Books Collection at San Francisco State University Library; at its most humble, its final resting place will be between the baby blanket and children’s drawing on a bookshelf in my home studio

MARCH 20, 2020, late evening We have lived in limbo before.

This insular life of Safer at Home is reminiscent of the 6 weeks after my son died in 2012. My eldest (age four at the time), my partner, and I stayed home for about 6 weeks. Food was brought to our home, dropped off by people wanting to help, but not wanting to get too close. The invisible couriers.

During that time, the brave ones would stay. Our community was in and out of our home like a semipermeable surface. There were times when our modest flat would be quietly bustling.

I am indebted to the close friends who flew from faraway places and to the friends and acquaintances who showed up. My best friend from preschool and a good friend from high school got together immediately after my son’s death and took over all planning and logistics for my daughter’s 4th birthday party. Four days after my son’s death, we walked into a friend’s home transformed into a beautifully calm and joyful fairyland, complete with crafts and music. At home, my friend Nyeisha Prince, a colleague from the salon where I had worked, would come and visit.

She would sit with me and chat for hours, though in retrospect, these visits were probably thirty minutes each. These visits brought such comfort. Not only because Nyeisha is good listener and storyteller, but due in no small part to the fact that Nyeisha is capital D Deaf. My abilities in ASL at the time were intermediate at best, but after years of working together, she was patient. To talk without using my voice and without speaking to a friend who was willing to listen albeit without hearing was a gift.

And then there were the acquaintances on the periphery. A colleague of my husband’s volunteered to assemble three large IKEA bookcases that were delivered the day our son died. I remember him

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in the dining room, quiet and calm, confidently putting each case together, tidying up, smiling sadly.

“Cast a wide net,” I tell the newly bereaved mother. “You never know who will be up for the Darkness and who will disappear.”

Others would come into our home with meals. In fact, we didn’t make lunch or dinner during those first six weeks. We shared the meal they brought on the concrete driveway converted to patio behind our apartment. They were awkward as we asked questions about how their families were doing, but we were grateful to listen. Grateful to not have to talk about the coroner. Grateful to not talk about the LAPD investigation. Then they would put away the dishes, help our preschooler make her bed, walk the dogs. Though we were homebound, crippled by the death of our son, our community was present. They made space for us between the layers of grief so we could eat without cooking, take a breath without screaming.

This quarantine in the age of COVID-19 is so different. The dogs we had are long gone. A chicken coop stands where the dogs once rested in the shade. The preschooler is now a middle schooler.

Our third child, unburdened by the same grief that affects the rest of her family, carries feisty and unbridled joy we are all grateful for.

Our home is a fortress. It is filled with more laughter than our weeks and months of early grief.

Melancholy adults are replaced by jump roping children. The antics of our now homeschooled children coupled with the mannerisms of our lone elderly hen Camilla are enough to lighten the weight of uncertainty.

As an MFA student, I bounced back and forth weekly from Los Angeles to San Francisco. This uncommon approach was driven by finances and opportunity. Most weeks I was four days on campus, three days at home in L.A. In 2019, I was one flight short of Southwest Airlines’ A-List Preferred, the prize for 50 paid flights in one calendar year. The other twenty flights via mileage tickets and travel on other airlines don’t count.

In San Francisco, days are packed with classes and libraries and teaching and studio time and writing and research and studio visits and lectures. At almost forty, I have a part-time lease with a room of my own and a 96-year-old roommate named Lucille. I’m pulling 18-hour days to pack the work of six days into four. I’m damn good at it and, as it comes to an end, I realize how much I treasure the crazy schedule. All of the travel, all of the distance, and all of the 10 hour stretches of studio time lead to a body of work that is in debt to this schedule.

It’s not without a cost to my family. There are things that happened while I was away that I imagine I will always regret I was not there for. The first lost tooth. The 100% on the geography quiz. The cross country meets. The winter performance. The phantom first period. The humiliation of our child on the playground by her peers with no ally to defend or protect her, and the secret devastation that followed.

The return to LA was always sweet. The rush to get off campus. The Thursday late-night flight to Los Angeles followed by Friday morning wake up. Children to school by 8am and myself to my other job as a salon owner and hairstylist where I pay off my education as it happens by doing highlights, long layers, base colors, and “just-a-trim” trims.

Early afternoon pick-up and catch up with the kids. Family dinner. A walk. Bedtime stories. To bed by 8 exhausted by the week. Saturday morning, I am up at 6 to be at the salon by 6:45. My first client is at 7 and I’ll be there until 5. Then the end of day text… I’m just sweeping up now. My last client was late. Home in 20. Need anything? Dinner. Bed. Review notes from the week.

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Sunday is shopping and folding. My husband plans meals for the week. I pre-cook. Pack my bags.

Make dinner. Some weeks, I’m in a Lyft before pajamas and dessert and back to San Francisco Sunday night. Others, I sleep for a few hours, but must leave by four on Monday morning to get to LAX. Regardless, I’m answering emails, assembling PowerPoints, and writing papers in the terminal.

I am on the plane writing notes in the first draft of my now-abandoned thesis report.

And then this schedule, this scheme to have it all, was interrupted.

On February 26, 2020, the Sacramento Bee reported the first community case in the US of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Northern California. Within 10 days, classes at SF State were suspended.

At 1am on March 9th, I arrived in San Francisco. On campus by 7:30am. By 3pm, there were rumors of a closure and a confirmed case around the corner from Lucille’s apartment. At 7pm that night, I booked the last flight out of SFO. I grabbed my laptop, my octopus ink, a handful of brushes, my Instamax, one notebook, a dozen drawings I recently made of my son, packed my two small bags to the gills and headed south.

By 1am March 10th I was scrubbing my hands in the privacy of my Mid-Wilshire apartment.

MARCH 21, 2020 All in-person classes are suspended until the end of the term. It’s my second semester as a professor of record and I’ve sorted out a way to teach figure drawing via online meeting platforms.

An unexpected star for the cv.

Then there is the exhibition. Is it postponed? Cancelled? Rescheduled? Reconfigured?

I pine for my work. The work that will go unseen is work I myself cannot touch. I am in Los Angeles, 390 miles from a locked and empty mausoleum of an art building. The majority of the pieces for the exhibition are in San Francisco collecting dust. In order to produce an accurate account of the work, I just need the dimensions recorded on the versa. I have most of my notes, but not all of them. My iPhone photos will have to do.

I consider calling in a favor to a friend in San Francisco to get what I need. Would they be willing to go to my studio, pack, and then ship my gouache, half a dozen books, the 24 small-ish works on paper, and 6 tubes of oil paint? I consider the 390-mile drive. I have the drive down to a rest-stop only routine. I can be there in six hours. I know where everything is. I could be out of the city in 60 minutes. It’s 6 am now and I’ll be back in LA before bedtime. The thought of mucus hardening in my lungs and the lungs of those I love from Covid-19 is enough to get me to cancel the text and put down the keys. I go to my home studio. I write. I paint with what I have. I draw every damn mundane detail of my day.

And here we are. What started four months ago as a cool yet strenuous report on my thesis project has upturned.

Isn’t it in times like this where our metal is tested? Isn’t it in times like this where artists actually have a role in society beyond the neoliberal Art World of the fair and the auction? Isn’t this, as that choreographer so eloquently put it, what we have been training for?

MARCH 24, 2020 Fourteen days since my return to LA. I am symptom free, but I am not going anywhere.

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APRIL 1, 2020 My mind wanders… at what other points in history did artists need to reschedule? At what other points were the dead going underreported? I think of the AIDS Crisis. I think of polio and Zika. I think of 1917, 1918, 1919 when war and lack of communications lead people to be blindsided by Spanish Influenza. I think of the children who died. I think of Kathe Kollwitz and Alice Neel and Mary Frank, Mary Rutherford, and Rebecca Campbell.

I take some solace in the fact that very few children seem to be getting sick from COVID-19. Up to this point, I only have one acquaintance who was hospitalized. That said, my white friends on social media are dusting off sewing machines and baking bread, my black friends are posting images of their loved ones who seem to be dying left and right. They are dying from ‘flare ups from preexisting conditions.’ It’s yet unclear how Covid-19 plays into this, but black and brown elders are dying. Days later the headline reads: Seventy Percent of Chicago’s Dead Are in the Black Community.

These are the parents and the grandparents of our essential workers.

The tests for Covid-19 are not equitably distributed here in Los Angeles. I’m worried about my neighbors. No demographic data along ethnic and racial lines is collected. I stay home. I keep my children home in masks and 10 feet away from the neighbors we hold dear.

Then there is my work and my job.

As for my job, becoming a hairdresser was always how I funded the painting habit. Upon my arrival back in Los Angeles on March 9, I realized it would be irresponsible to see clients in my small salon in Beverly Hills.

I was nervous. I’d been travelling. I’d been to a conference. The space is tiny. I only see one client at a time anyway. That either lowers the risk, or hot boxes me in with the someone who has the virus. Days later, the mayor of Beverly Hills closed all salons in the city.

Then there is the Work.

Abandoned in my studio 390-odd miles away. My Paint. All of my paint. The paint I can’t afford to replace]. My personal pharmakon. Scores of tubes of oil: rose, vermilion, the cadmiums, the umbers, and that very specific shade of indigo that cheats black. In Amy Stillman’s Color as Material lecture at the Whitney, she speaks of these “precious poisons” comparing herself and other painters to drug addicts who ignore their personal health to get that last molecule of dianthus pink out of a tube. She compares the cost to the “pleasure hours of cadmium red to the pleasure hours of cocaine. For today, I stay on the wagon. For today, I won’t risk my life for that tube of French Cerulean.

A colleague offers to bring me what I’d left in my studio including my paint and the books for my research I bought as they are not available digitally. She would bring it all, if only she can stay with us in Los Angeles for a few nights. I declined. She came to LA without staying with us, without my tools or paint. My family as of 4/1/2020 remains healthy… Perhaps I will have access to my studio in June…after my thesis is finished and my culmination.

Tucked in my SFSU studio, which no doubt in my haste to catch the last flight out on March 9th resembles Francis Bacon’s apartment on a tidy day, are all the pieces for my thesis exhibition.

TUESDAY APRIL 7, 2020 (SAH Day 29, 11 days until thesis opening)

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It’s 5am on Tuesday April 7th, and the reported death toll in the United States is at 10,980. My partner is up. We’ve made coffee. I’m back at my desk in what once was a breakfast nook, then it was home to the kitchen couch until recently when it was converted into a homeschool space for my 2 children. Ten days ago, Amazon.com, courtesy of the workers unable to stay at home, delivered 2 matching desks to our dining room; the newest venue for Los Angeles Unified School Districts k-12 education.

But now it is spring break for the children. The mountains in the High Sierra got a few feet of snow in the last few days. Our skis are tucked safely in our basement waiting for 2021. Though I was born and raised in Alaska, I did not grow up downhill skiing. We had a full set of crosscountry skis from the 1960s my mother brought with her when she came to Alaska in 1970. We used those growing up when roads were closed.

They were for transport, not leisure. A necessity when machines gave out, but you still had somewhere to be. When it came to downhill, it was too expensive, and our family’s gear was too cheap or too old. My brother loved it, though. He worked summer jobs and winter jobs so he could get a ski pass. The few times we went as a family, I was always cold. Like cold cold. Alaska cold. When I was three or four, my mom took me out the first time. I fell on her twisting her knee, retiring her from the sport, instilling a bit of resentment throughout the family unit. The domino effect of that fall was considerable.

In 2017 it became clear that my little family’s opinion on downhill skiing was favorable. I had to get with the program. At age 37, I learned to ski.

The children, my husband, and I don masks for our evening walk through our LA neighborhood.

Homemade masks, skiing buffs, and VOG masks for travel. Staying within a half mile of our apartment, we wove our way in and out of blocks of duplexes and fourplexes from the 1930s and 1940s. Discussing the snow report, my youngest and I began “skiing” our way through the neighborhood. Moving up the sides of driveways as if they were an easy green slope. Skate-skiing our way on the flat bits unit we cross the street to the best patch of POW. My eldest jumps side to side as she makes her way down black diamonds. These moguls are breaks in the concrete sidewalk formed by fichus, rubber trees, and Callery Pear. My youngest falls. I “ski” ahead to help her up.

She places her feet side to side on the sidewalk so she won’t slide into me. She then zooms passed me, giggling and jumping, delighting in the memory of snow, fresh air, the forest, and a special type of silence and quiet a cold mountain provides. This fantasy makes the masks make sense. It’s the only other time we’ve relied on masks as a family. It’s late enough in the evening that no one else is out. Social distance has gifted us solitude.

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This motion of carving through snow up and back and up and back inspired the score for Acoustic Energy Distribution of Chorus Howls, the 8’x 12’ piece left abandoned on my studio wall. The painting is the notation of a movement. The notation of this very specific movement was made in anticipation of a weekend in the mountains. The up and back makes the landscape appear.

I more often than not work within a predetermined score. From the constraints emerge representation. The score can be a question, a motion for my body, an intention for the viewer's body. The process of making and the process of viewing are critical to the work.

APRIL 9, 2020 It’s 2:30 in the morning and it’s raining here in Los Angeles. I’m up and out of bed. Decaf coffee and a few Joe Joes[5] snuck from the pantry. I’m ready to work. I sit at the small wooden secretary I inherited from my Grandmother. My wrists hurt like hell, but my lungs are clear so that’s a win. I draw my San Francisco studio again and again and again from memory. My children and husband are fast asleep. It’s hard to work while they are awake. I can paint in their presence but drawing and writing take another sort of effort. I return to the drawings of my studio. What if bit by bit this studio reconstructed in the gallery could be my install?

Let’s go there, shall we? My studio is an open rectangle of a room 12’x10’x14’. I’d spent the 3 weeks previous to March 9th pacing the Fine Arts Gallery at SFSU planning out the presentation of my work. I had just begun the construction of my mobile archive to be installed within the gallery.

The architecture in the Fine Arts Gallery demanded two additional large-scale paintings. By “demanded” perhaps I mean whispered the opportunity.

As you walk into my studio and look to the left there is a 2.5’x4’ storage zone between an old white board and a large vertical sheet of underlayment. There stands an old hat rack laden with a polar fleece jumper, full body coverall from a company that “recycles'' old mechanics coveralls. A pair of Dickies. An old shirt. A maroon bike helmet leant to me by artist Claudia Huenchuelo. A Trader Joe's tote bag. The hat rack looks a bit like a palm tree overstuffed at the top. At its feet are all sizes of shipping tubes and concrete form tubes containing art works: a set for a play on Helena Weigel and Bertolt Brecht I designed in fall of 2019, a scroll in vinyl recounting the life and death of my son from 2016-2017, a series of paintings about sex, a 10’x3’ self-portrait called “Letters” from a collaboration with filmmaker Brother Nich Perez, memory paintings of the Son Doong Cave in Vietnam. There is an REI brand fold out cot for naps on travel days, a heavy scrubbing broom, an easel with an abandon painting, and large rolled up 8’x10’ gouache landscape, the precursor to Fragments. This nook houses the small ephemera and art works made in grief as well as evidence of my social practice and large drawings on paper that JUST fits under the ceiling. And a box of work lights.

Take one more step and you will see the draft of my mobile archive, Nice to meet You, Madame President: Archive from the Dead Baby Club 2012-2019. Within 4’x 8’ walls of unfinished wooden underlayment are a typewriter stand, a viewing table, a few shelves, a fluorescent work light handmade books, prototype for a printed catalogue, small journal, letters, and acid-free boxes. The boxes hold Polaroids, letters, small drawings, numerous book projects, photographs of my partner and I before and after my son’s death. Mounted on the wall are tracings on vellum of drawings I’ve made for families while their children are in hospice care. I sit with them as they hold their dying children. I sit, I draw, I listen, I cry, we laugh. One doesn’t earn the nickname “President of Dead Baby Club” for a life of inaction.

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On the edge of the viewing table, there is a box open and empty. Until March 9th it contained a 7”x5.5”x3” stack of drawings bundled in twine. Untie this and you would see a collection of drawings of my now deceased son. All the drawings are made in the cool sepia of octopus ink on paper. Each drawing is made from digital images of my son. In the depths of grief, the digital image is accessible. But the digital isn’t even ephemera. It’s a memory made of light. I need something to hold on to. These small drawings are tangible.

This is the only artwork I brought with me on March 9th when I left my studio to return home, unable to finish the final months of the program as expected due to COVID-19. I wrapped them in linen and put them in my backpack next to my laptop, my school journal, and the last vile of octopus ink I own. I may have forgotten the small pouch of watercolors, the books pertinent to my research, but I remembered the drawings of my son.

Next to the boxes and the old typewriter I used to create What Not to Say there is a large steel rolodex…I imagine it comes from the 1980s. Judging by the left-over cards from the previous owner, it sat on a proper secretary’s desk in the tri-state area. It had a long desk life in the work of calling attorneys and architects. The rolodex itself was gifted to me from Melissa and Luke BaileyWong, an incredibly eccentric couple from Australia with fabulous taste and a skill and commitment to Craig’s List that is unrivaled. (Melissa and I both have grandparents born in Launceston, Tasmania. Our children like to pretend we are all somehow related.)

Their eldest child died on March 25, 2017. We had met in passing before Jade’s death, but after she died our mutual friend came to me for advice.

I’ve received this call on a dozen occasions since our son died in 2012. It always starts with a text.

Can you talk?

Call when you have a sec…

I have a question for you…

It’s always a friend of the family, rarely the family themselves. I’ve received this call so many times I have a list of questions that are committed to memory: How old was the child? Did the child die at home? Was the family with the child? Is the cause of death being shared outside the family? Do they have other children? Are they religious? Is their extended family religious? Are the parents together or separated? Have you (friend) been to the house/ Has the family reached out to you yet?

Is there someone coordinating their support? Do they have a funeral home/ cremation service they are working with? Have you been to the house? Have you spoken with the parents today? Are they active on social media? Do they have a cat or a dog in the house?

That is how it begins. Over the next days and weeks, I’ll help assemble a Grief Team. I’ll map out two sets of concentric circles. The first is based on The Ring theory of Kvetching.

The Family is in the center. Followed by close family, then close friends, then older friends, close work associates, acquaintances, work acquaintances. The second infographic is based not on relationships, but emotional ability to complete a task. An effective Grief Team casts a wide net within a community, makes space for failure, discomfort and complicated family relations, and finally, assigns actionable roles to those around the family determined by the family. The team fundraises for funeral costs and incidentals, grocery shops for the family, organizes a meal train, hires and communicates with a housekeeper or gardener, provides childcare when needed, takes the newly bereaved parents for walks or hikes, coordinates with charities, helps plan and execute the memorial service, calls hospice to get the bed out of the house, walks the dog, takes out the

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kitty litter. The Grief Team strictly adheres to the Ring theory of Grief, doesn’t interject their own spiritual beliefs on the family, and listens.

Most often I remain invisible. I am not a death doula. I don’t accept money or compensation for my advice. I do give the family my cell number and say text anytime. They do. This little archive captures all of this.

In the rolodex, bits and pieces of this experience are hand typed on vellum. Advice and devastations are alphabetized and categorized from “ADVICE I GIVE TO THE NEWLY BEREAVED” to “WHAT NOT TO SAY.” The industrial steel lid of the rolodex is meant to slide open and the viewer can flip through and read every word. The rolodex can be closed at any point when it gets to be too much, and one needs to move on.

Another step into the studio and you pass the archive and see my steel bookshelves, my steel flat file filled with projects of my graduate school experience. On top of the flat file, abandon is a group of oil paintings on paper drawings on paper, The Entropy Cliché…

During this time in self-quarantine I’m thinking of a project called “Alexis Draws on Menus.” It’s not scholarly or conceptual. It’s quite literally a collection of paper menus with portraits of friends and strangers made while dining out. The first ever menu drawing was a sneaked portrait from life of an unsuspecting Robert Longo, drawn after he spoke at the ACE hotel in 2016.

I haven’t stepped foot in a grocery store or a café in over a month.

APRIL 10, 2020 Friday April 10th and I’m not supposed to be in Los Angeles. It’s where I belong. It’s my adopted home. It’s where my children were born, where my son died, where family is, and where my practice lives. But my research, my students, my studio, my newly found mentors are in San Francisco.

My graduate experience belongs to a time. A three-year program condensed into two years and interrupted at month 19. Fine. I kept track of every video watched, every drawing made, every reading assigned, every painting completed, every sketchbook filled.

Our opening was scheduled for Saturday the 18th.

I’ll make another punch list for the exhibition. It’s a loss for sure. ____________________________________________________________________________________ APRIL 13, 2020 Monday April 13th and we’d planned to be in San Francisco. We’d tentatively arranged for my mother to meet my eldest in San Francisco for the week as I installed my show.

I’m home today. My wrist braces arrived in the mail. ________________________________________________________________________________________

April 15, 2020 Wednesday April 15th and I’m here in Los Angeles.

I cancelled the remaining eight flights scheduled for this semester. Slowly but surely my body resembles the biga we depend on for our bread. It’s pale, squishy, and sour. The wrist braces are helping with the pain and the numbness, but the weakness is something else. It’s increasing and it’s

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troublesome. I couldn’t keep my grip today. A lifetime of drawing and 18 years as a hairdresser have taken a toll on my hands. I dropped a coffee mug, a drinking glass, and a small porcelain cup.

I drop my phone and keys so often I attached a cord to the phone case so I could wrap it around my wrist. I was once burly. Not just burly for a woman, burly for a human. The slow pace of quarantine magnifies the change in my hands and it’s hard. In what could be a healthy denial for the time being, I tell myself it will be fine.

The New York Times is offering aspects of the paper for free. There is a new feature with three-lined obituaries for those who have died: age 87, age 62, a new father age 22, age 108, age 52, age 47, age 33…. Last night we had dinner with my in-laws age 75 and 77. They live in the flat upstairs until it’s safe enough for them to travel back east.

APRIL 16, 2020 Thursday April 16th and my in-laws are not supposed to be here, but I am glad they are. They were visiting friends in Palm Springs when it became apparent Corona was hitting the US. They had arranged for a tenant to take over their apartment on April 1. The future tenant was in New York visiting family the first week of March and decided not to come back to LA. My in-laws contacted their doctors and under no circumstances was my father-in-law to get on a plane or be in public. He is 77 but his heart is only 48.

In 2012, I was 36 weeks pregnant with the child who would be my son when we got a call from my in-laws. It was a Sunday. We were at the Hollywood Farmers Market. My in-laws were flying to Ohio.

My father-in-law’s enlarged heart was deteriorating. There was a donor heart headed to the Cleveland Clinic. My father in law was the sickest person that fit the donor heart. It was a match.

The donor was 40 years old. My father-in-law had the surgery. It went well. He was on the mend. 6 weeks later I gave birth to our son. Across the country there were sudden complications with my father-in-law’s recovery. ICU. Hallucinations due to medications. Respirators. My mother-in-law was exhausted, worried, alone. Our little family, ages 33, 32, 3 ¾, and 4 weeks old, got on a plane to see Grandad. We introduced my father in law, deep in stupor, unable to speak, to our son. We assumed this could be our only photo op. We were right. Four weeks later, my father-in-law's condition greatly improved, but our son was dead.

As we practice physical distancing, I am grateful to have outdoor space behind our duplex. It was the first meal we ate together since March 2nd. [9] I think about protecting my father in law. And it’s not just a love and respect for him. It’s protecting that donor heart. Knowing there is another bereaved parent out there who still can’t believe their child died unexpectedly in 2012. By taking care of ‘Grandad’ I’m somehow caring for this parent I’ve never met as well.

We eat our meal. We have some chocolate. We put away Camilla, the old hen. Dishes. Switch laundry. Brush teeth. Read Marvel’s Moongirl to my six-year-old. Pajamas. Watch the quarter final of the British Bake Off. More books. Bed. APRIL 17, 2020 On April 8th, the New England Journal of Medicine published the study “Coagulopathy and Antiphospholipid Antibodies in Patients with Covid-19” pointing to blood clots as a fatal complication associated with Covid-19. The details of the study won’t be made available for weeks, but the headline is out. Covid-19 poses an increased risk of blood clots. (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2007575)

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For the first time I am truly terrified. Breathe. Stretch. Wash hands. Stay home. Keep working.

APRIL 18, 2020 It’s here: April 18, 2020.

This date’s been written in pencil on my grad-school studio wall in San Francisco since August 2018. In an interesting circle of events, it was April 18, 2018 I accepted the position in the graduate program at SFSU. It’s 7 am. I’m awake, but my legs are asleep. I am sitting in the back garden of our duplex watching our old hen dig through the dirt. I have four weeks left to complete the work in my master’s program. Without the hum of the freeway, the sound of the wild birds is loud. California towhees, house sparrows, hummingbirds, crows.

The birds in the hedge next to my studio were so loud the other day they interrupted the class I was teaching via ZOOM. A week ago, I saw a Wilson’s warbler. Nothing so interesting this morning.

In my San Francisco studio, in a box, on top of my flat file is a collection of 24 paintings on paper next to a roll containing eight 4’x6’ paintings on drop cloth. They are waiting. I am waiting.

But unlike a month ago, I have some answers. We have solutions. This week work begins in earnest to flesh out the digital version of our exhibition.

An online show on a German website is in the early planning stages. It is now very possible the show that will never be seen will in fact be seen.

Seen on tablets and cell phones and laptops. This dispersion run through foreign servers and IP addresses will be an international effort to get the work up and running.

Art handlers are replaced by code writers. Curators replaced by algorithms.

Likes and shares become the pat on the back.

The influencer and the anonymous troll take over for the critic.

APRIL 18, 2020 11pm

My landlord at the salon sends a message; rent abatement from mid-March to mid-May. The CDC won’t release the data for this week until tomorrow. “Data during recent weeks are incomplete because of the lag in time between when the death occurred and when the death certificate is completed, submitted to NCHS and processed for reporting purposes”. The United States weathered at least 13,130 deaths in seven weeks and counting. Ten thousand of those deaths were between 3/39-4/11/20. We are staying home for the time being. Doing our part to “flatten the curve.” All of these statistics are from the CDC’s website. Also in the CDC’s website are

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stats of infant mortality from 2005-2014. My son is there somewhere. It’s not known where his death is counted. Behind which bar in the bar graph is he hiding? His cause of death was unknown. Most likely accidental asphyxiation. Not SIDS, but SUIDS. Is that unintentional death? Like a near accident on black ice, I spin out and then regain control.

I’m trying to look up the stats for COVID-19 and then this. I am exhausted.

I’m looking for my son even now.

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PART 5: Acknowledgements First off, thank you to W.G. Keiner for caring for our children, our marriage, and our home during the last 19 months. Thank you to D. H. and L. A. for your patience, support, and contributions to my practice.

I am very lucky to have spent the better part of the last two years with the people who make up SF State School of Art. Thank you to the faculty, staff, and students of San Francisco State University School of Art. Most notably: Libby Black, Sean McFarland, Mark Dean Johnson, Mike Arcega, Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, Chris Finley, and Gwen Allen. Your humor, rigor, and academic generosity are deeply appreciated and have been deeply influential on my art practice..

Thank you for the studio visits, reading lists, professional opportunities, and rapport.

Thank you to the staff of the School of Art: Gaelan Spor, Steven Garen, Lori Schafer, Chris Morring, and Candi. Thank you for helping me find everything from flat flies to missing forms to L brackets to index cards.

Thank you to the SFSU Department of Journalism for the use of your typewriter (and now retired Mr. Cox for letting me sneak it out of the building).

Thank you to my colleagues within the MFA program. To my fall 2018 cohort, you truly are a special group. I relied on all of you for your honesty and support. Thank you to my all MFA cohort (classes of 2019, 2020, and 2021).

Thank you to my extended (Barhar/Hallie/Keiner/Roberts/Trice/Waterfield) family: Without your emotional support, humor, and tolerance I never would have completed this project.

Thank you for all you have done in the last two years and the many years before that!

Thank you to my elders. Deep gratitude for my late mentor Diana Tillion and her husband Clem Tillion of Halibut Cove, Alaska. To my many the entire community of Halibut Cove for your long distance support. Thank you to Lucille Cuttler for being my cheerleader and keeping me in coffee and morning oats while in San Francisco.

And last but not least, to members of the real Dead Baby Club. Thank you for holding me up, letting me in to your lives, and supporting this work.

A.R. Keiner 5.14.20

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PART 6: References/ Reading List * *Due to the COVID -19 pandemic and subsequent Shelter-in-Place and Safer at Home ordinances throughout California, a complete bibliography was not possible at the time of submission (5/15/2020).

Artbound. S.9.E9.“Artist and Mother” PBS, 53:20. 04/17/18 https://www.pbs.org/video/artist-and-

mother-hpp1wm/ Banes, Sally. 1998. Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage. London ; New York: Routledge.

Barthes, Roland., Nathalie. Léger, and Richard Howard. 2010. Mourning Diary: October 26, 1977September 15, 1979. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bausch, Pina/ ARTE LIVE, “Orpheus und Eurydike” Premiere 23 Mai 1975 Opera House Wuppertal, International engagements /Tours 1993 Paris; 1994 Genoa; 2008 Epidaure; Düsseldorf, UBU.COM, 2:02:52,

http://ubu.com/dance/bausch_orpheus.html Graddy, Kathryn, and Lieberman, Carl. 2018. Management Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2850.

Hoban, Phoebe. 2010. Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Kagan, Shelly. 2012. Death. Yale University Press.

Krasner, Nairne, Siegel, Yau, Hudson, Levin, Nairne, Eleanor, et al. 2019. Lee Krasner: Living Colour. London, England: Thames & Hudson Ltd : Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre.

Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Graddy, Kathryn, and Carl Lieberman. 2018. “Death, Bereavement, and Creativity.” Management Science 64 (10): 4505–14. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2850. .

Moyers, Bill: Bill T. Jones: Still / Here with Bill Moyers "Still/Here." min 29:13-36:24 Bill T Jones: Still/Here, with Bill Moyers. (The Moyers Collection) Films for the Humanities & Sciences. 1997. 57min.

Nedo, Kito, W h y K ä t h e K o l l w i t z , a n I c o n o f G e r m a n M o d e r n A r t , I s S t i l l S o C o n t r o v e r s i a l o n H e r 1 5 0 t h A n n i v e r s a r y , A R T N E T N E W S , July 18, 2017,

https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/kathe-kollwitz-german-modern-art-controversial-1021973

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Nereson, A. (2011), ‘Embodying the undiscussable: Documentary methodology in Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and the culture wars’, Studies in Musical Theatre 5: 3, pp. 297–304, doi: 10.1386/smt.5.3.297_1 NewsRx Health & Science. 2017. “Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences; New Study Finds Artwork Is Worth 35 Percent Less When Created by 'tortured' Artists”, 2017. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1977081140/.

Palacios, Vicente, José Vicente López-Bao, Luis Llaneza, Carlos Fernández, and Enrique Font. 2016.

“Decoding Group Vocalizations: The Acoustic Energy Distribution of Chorus Howls Is Useful to Determine Wolf Reproduction.” PloS One 11 (5): e0153858–e0153858. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0153858.

Phelan, Peggy. 1997. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. London ; New York: Routledge.

Purifoy, Noah. 2015. Noah Purifoy: High Desert Assemblage Artist. First edition. Göttingen: Steidl Publishers.

Rawson, Ashish, Mohammad B Hossain, Ankit Patras, Maria Tuohy, and Nigel Brunton. 2013.

“Effect of Boiling and Roasting on the Polyacetylene and Polyphenol Content of Fennel (Foeniculum Vulgare) Bulb.” Food Research International 50 (2): 513–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2011.01.009 Susan Silk, Barry Goldman, “How not to say the wrong thing” Los Angeles Times APRIL 7, 2013 https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-xpm-2013-apr-07-la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407story.html Whitney Museum of American Art, “Seminars with Artists: Amy Sillman | Live from the Whitney.”

YouTube Video, Nov 12, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stk38nsVyos

:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article240674471.html March 17, 2020.

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stk38nsVyos Amy Stillman, Color as Material November 14, 2014 [1] [2]

JoeJoes: an off-brand chocolate sandwich cookie similar to Oreos. I prefer Trader Joe’s brand jellybeans or chocolate, but I’ll take what I can get.

[6] 4/7/2013 https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-xpm-2013-apr-07-la-oe-0407-silk-ringtheory-20130407-story.html [5]

[7]

Infographic by Wes Bausmith / Los Angeles Times

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Biga: a thick mixture of flour, water, and yeast that is allowed to ferment for some time before being combined with fresh dough to make bread, used especially in Italian baking.

[8]

Separate dinners cooked in separate kitchens with separate tables pushed together, but not too close. We would do this until we got spooked on May 11 and returned to strict quarantine.

[10] From https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html 4/19/2020: “Data during recent weeks are incomplete because of the lag in time between when the death occurred and when the death certificate is completed, submitted to NCHS and processed for reporting purposes”.

[9]

[

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db279.htm

[1]

Los Angeles County’s version of Shelter in Place

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