Erin Elizabeth Adams & Kio Griffith
Los Angeles / USA
Erin Elizabeth Adams and Kio Griffith
The Great Pause
video/sound (2:28), 2020
Erin Elizabeth Adams and Kio Griffith, 4/26/2020
Artists statement for - The Great Pause
Rumors of a terrible flu had been flying around for a few weeks and it seemed like many of the students in our classes were sicker than usual during an active flu season. Kio Griffith and I (Erin Adams) were at the end of our second quarter at a busy MFA program at The University of California Santa Barbara as the Corona Virus Pandemic (Covid 19) was announced on March 16th. Most of us grads work as teaching assistants in large lecture halls and were already concerned about getting sick so I think it’s safe to say we were worried, but happy to get into a safer situation. Classes were cancelled and all 26,314 students were asked to leave the campus as it would be closed down. After a couple of restless and fretful weeks of Quarantine and a couple of phone calls talking to each other about our general shock and distain of the Trump administrations handling of this situation plus the rising death tolls and looming uncertainty we agreed to work together to create a video that would reflect our current state of mind. These were the early days of the US death tolls and that day the story broke about the pauper’s graves being dug and coffins being loaded into them. There were images of this on the news. I immediately started sending Kio iphone images. Tons of news footage of mass graves, Trump, Brain Williams, Fauchi and Gulliani as well as distorted self portraits that could possible be used. We chose to narrow down to just news footage and Kio took it from there to create the overall blurred and spinning look of the video.
P.S. Erin Adams and Kio Griffith were undergraduates at Otis Art Institute, Parsons School of Design in 1986 and are now in graduate school at UCSB in 2020, 34 years later.
Artists statement for - The Great Pause
Rumors of a terrible flu had been flying around for a few weeks and it seemed like many of the students in our classes were sicker than usual during an active flu season. Kio Griffith and I (Erin Adams) were at the end of our second quarter at a busy MFA program at The University of California Santa Barbara as the Corona Virus Pandemic (Covid 19) was announced on March 16th. Most of us grads work as teaching assistants in large lecture halls and were already concerned about getting sick so I think it’s safe to say we were worried, but happy to get into a safer situation. Classes were cancelled and all 26,314 students were asked to leave the campus as it would be closed down. After a couple of restless and fretful weeks of Quarantine and a couple of phone calls talking to each other about our general shock and distain of the Trump administrations handling of this situation plus the rising death tolls and looming uncertainty we agreed to work together to create a video that would reflect our current state of mind. These were the early days of the US death tolls and that day the story broke about the pauper’s graves being dug and coffins being loaded into them. There were images of this on the news. I immediately started sending Kio iphone images. Tons of news footage of mass graves, Trump, Brain Williams, Fauchi and Gulliani as well as distorted self portraits that could possible be used. We chose to narrow down to just news footage and Kio took it from there to create the overall blurred and spinning look of the video.
P.S. Erin Adams and Kio Griffith were undergraduates at Otis Art Institute, Parsons School of Design in 1986 and are now in graduate school at UCSB in 2020, 34 years later.