Love in a time of war: the art of looking for art in expected places

I asked my Instagram community of friends and acquaintances if they’ve been feeling progressively apathetic about life since the pandemic began, of those who responded most answered yes. I turned 27 a few weeks ago, and it dawned on me that I was now living in the youth that had been the container for my dreams. At some point during the pandemic, I had realized there was nowhere to place all my hopes of the future, all the hopes of who I could be as an adult, I have arrived. My older-self held all the hopes and dreams of my younger self. I metaphorically threw all my eggs into my 20s basket. Any age beyond 29, seemed like a place where dreams were retired not deferred. Like many young girls, I’ve been taught that my value was bottled in my youth.

You can chalk it up to getting older or living through the COVID pandemic, or the apex and subsequent decline of the Black Lives Matter movement but the past few years have been disappointing. When the pandemic first began, I was in my earlier (lol) twenties, and now I’m in my late twenties, and in that time, I feel like I’ve lost much of the excitement and curiosity I entered my 20s with. In trying to name this overwhelming sense that I must learn to be again since emerging from the lockdown stage of the pandemic, I researched on pandemic-induced apathy. I also scrolled through threads by twitter users who couldn’t understand why it was getting harder to stay motivated. I knew I was not alone in feeling this way, but the question remained, how can I regain a sense of being in the world and belonging to it? How can I do this in the absence of the ease which is meant to indicate an innate sense of knowing what to do or where to go next? When I was younger, the future was hopeful because it appeared so vast, without limits. The older I get, the more choices I make, the less room I have to pivot. At first, I became preoccupied with restoring meaning into my life with grand ambitions; I was imagining how my well-thought-out actions could have far-reaching (positive) impacts on the world. Hollywood had seemed a stone-throw away when I was younger, I tried to recapture that blissful ignorance and unawareness of my own limits.

Truthfully, I often feel that the world is chewing me up and spitting me out. I am an immigrant here (in Canada), but in this time of chaos and uncertainty, I feel like an immigrant here and everywhere. If being an artist and a consumer of art has taught me anything, it’s that, if I pay close attention, I should always be prepared to be surprised. Much of my own storytelling is a retelling of an event or a memory through my own eyes. For example, when I dream of home, for example, there is an image of the same house that materializes, and the windows look on at the metal latch gate at the end of a driveway. The house is slightly elevated creating the feeling that it is waiting for someone to come home, someone who could be in view any minute. Over time, the house’s eyes look on languidly at the road outside of the gate, as though no one worth waiting for has visited in a while. To a passerby, it is just brick and mortar.

Living has always been the first stage of the creative process. A friend of mine said to me, when I asked for writing advice, “live so you have something worth writing about.” This world is made and altered by the places you have been, and the people you love. It is collaborative art project and each of us have a little place to tell our stories as we remember them. I am excited for every new story that is yet to be told about falling in love, even though so many have already written about it. When we talk about accessibility in the arts, I don’t immediately think of lowering the cost of art consumption, although this can be a part of it. I think the accessibility also requires a shift in our mindset about how art is created and distributed. Making art for art’s sake reminds me of a movie, I’ve watched about two people finding love in a time of war; the stories of war will have many witnesses, but the love between two people is a story only a few can tell. I want to draw more attention to these subtle ways of creating art and storytelling, to introduce more ways of enjoying art and encouraging our own creativity; I am interested in how families memorialize the past in photo albums or how you imagine the sound of your friend’s laughter when they send you a laughing emoji. So much of living is creating, when we are not restricted by the idea that art must be shared to a specific audience on a particular platform in order to qualify as art. I recently started listening to a podcast called Normal Gossip. The first question the host asks her guests is, “What is your relationship to gossip?” Gossip is culturally-specific storytelling practice that it is governed by different rituals regarding the time and place it should take place. I am excited to see how more people explore artmaking in this way and I have become more present in my own life, looking for art in expected places.