The way I see it, there are two kinds of artists: those who use art to reflect their reality, and those who use art to escape it. The former find solace in autobiography, creating works that explicitly mirror their own life experiences, or consuming art to which they can easily relate. The latter enjoy art as evasion, watching movies to live any life but their own, or making pieces that transport them away from their everyday.
If there’s one thing that these two months in COVID-19 induced quarantine has taught me, it’s that flexibility is an asset. Suspended between a blurred past and an uncertain future, students are forced to reconfigure their forward-looking mindsets in favor of mentality that takes life day by day.
For many students, life in quarantine has been characterized by mundanity, days that move drearily into one another without remark. Almost two months since the College canceled in-person classes, students are beginning to experience self-isolation as a new normal, habituating to the lifestyle in a way that makes it feel all the more dull as they become numb to emotions outside of their standard quarantine mood.
I sit down to interview Izzy Levi ’23 — over FaceTime, of course — exactly five weeks after we both left Williams, upending our routinized lives on campus and replacing them with unstructured, quarantined lives elsewhere.
There is something in a nationwide quarantine that, for many Americans, reconfigures their collective and individual sense of time’s passage. Entering self-isolation has forced them to upend the daily routines which they so treasure — hallmarks of productivity and accomplishment — and discover new ways to differentiate each day.
Wylie Thornquist '20 has been making art extensively in quarantine. He is an art history and studio major in the process of creating a senior thesis, which he described as “a series of prints and paintings exploring the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch hunts in Europe and how they relate to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.”
