NIGHT COMES EARLY
Before everything was canceled, I took one last trip to Texas. It was October 2019, and unseasonable storms rolled through, dropping tornadoes and lightning on a swath that swept from my in-laws house to my husband's hometown of Garland. This was a precursor, I thought, to the storm chasing trip I was planning to make that summer.
By Christmas, there were already media stirrings of a virus that was ravaging Wuhan, China. Soon, that virus had a name, and it was here, and I wasn’t going storm chasing. Fast forward to the post-vax world and I was in a car with my husband Andre, driving once again to Texas. This time it was tornado season, with one supercell after another marching across the flat and otherwise empty landscape. Andre drove the car and I shot out the window and I thought over and over again that I would love to drive forever, we could just keep going and going, the landscape unfurling ahead of us, a new vista every second….a visual feast after a year of seeing nothing but our own backyard.
My last trip pre-covid, and my first trip post-vax were to Texas, both serving up storm after storm, as if this broken world was giving me the trip I’d canceled. Maybe you don’t need to chase something that’s placed in your path.
We are bombarded with catastrophic images of severe weather in the media. My work deals with the same content, but these paintings are made from my own experiences, culled from wherever I happen to be. The slow apocalypse of climate change is with us every day; from heat waves, wildfires, grid failures, and floods, to storms rolling across the roads we travel with our beloveds. I’m interested in the daily, ongoing signs that are screaming at us, like the cursed Cassandra, that the end is surely near. But this world has a skin that looks the same as it ever was, and even shared moments of alarm recede into the bread and circuses that fill our days and our feeds and we march one step closer to our assured end.