Otherside

Otherside, acrylic on canvas, 36"x48", 2021-2022

I started this piece a few months after coming back to teaching fully in-person. Especially for students, acclimating back to socialization was hard. It was exacerbated by constant covid and close-contact absences. Adjusting back to a full teaching workload was a challenge, as I had to renegotiate how to fit in my own creative time. And the shortcomings of the public education system were becoming clearer to me. For the first time, finishing a piece of art didn’t feel like catharsis. Rather, it articulated the level of depression I was in without pointing to a way out of it.