VICKIE BYRON

 During the Covid quarantine, I started drawing more as a way to access feelings of isolation, aloneness, and entrapment. I used my hands as models and NYC as my obsession, representing the people and neighborhoods I missed and the obstacles between us. My first drawing, “Quarantined in Queens,” shows my hands gripping the cables of the Kosciuszko Bridge with a construction site and tangle of architecture between me and Manhattan. “Quarantine Barriers” shows the East River, a chain link fence, and fists to represent sociological and economic barriers and the BLM protests taking place at this time. In “Quarantine Flight” my puppet hands fly over the subway bridge expressing what many people were feeling, a desperate need to escape. These drawings leave a history of process and mark-making as a marker of time, rhythm as a metaphor for sameness and repetition, and closed geometric shapes to lock things down. Recently, color and oil paintings have resumed again.