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The New Normal (2026) is a selection of paintings based upon a meditation and reflection about the frustrating, enraging, isolating, and occasionally desperate natures of chronic illness and disability, made while struggling through serious health problems. It is roughly broken down into four collections:Things Left Unsaid is of some of the most common things I want to say when I am unwell or in crisis, but cannot, obscured by texture and only readable if you know how to see them.
The Wanderer pieces are deliberations on the isolation of being immunocompromised in a foreverdemic – exploring unforgiving environments alone, with no guide and no help coming.
Defiance contains the most direct expressions of my experiences as a chronically ill, disabled, and disconnected person, exploring the abstract rules of geometry while ruminating on loneliness, disconnect, embodied emotion, and living grief.
Unwell To Begin With directly explores the ephemera of disability and chronic illness through the relationship between important information and our ability to understand it when in a suboptimal state.
As a whole, these works provide a doorway into the experiences of navigating a complex, isolated existence while the majority of the world returns to a similar way of functioning as before the world changed for everyone. Some people have gone back to the closest thing they can find to a pre-COVID existence. Saying it's over, we're post-COVID, laughing about sourdough and streaming shows, complaining about how hard it was to stay home. Completely ignoring the millions who are too sick with Long Covid to leave their houses. Forgetting about all of us with compromised immune systems. Your new normal may be a lack of 24 hour stores or getting sick more often. Mine is social breakdown, loss of connection, fear of other people, precarity, and a suppressed rage. We could have worked together to flatten the statistical curve of COVID cases. We didn't have to let it run rampant. The only curves that were flattened are the ones in frames here.
The closing event will be staffed by the artist, burnsbothends (also known as Kayte Rose), with pieces available for sale. If you can't make this date, check out the opening weekend on 11/14-11/15, or reach out to the artist to schedule a free guided viewing.
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Event venue
RADIANT HALL (West/McKees Rocks), 734 Thompson Ave,McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, Mc Kees Rocks, United States
Tickets
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