This month’s film elicited a painting and associated short film in response. “Rabbit Hole/ Memory” by Megan Bell, explores isolation and imaginative drift through the lens of art making, and was created, like Agha’s film, during the current COVID-19 shutdowns in NYC.
Sindha Agha’s short film, How to Be Alone, speaks to quarantine’s loneliness and where your brain wanders when placed in a radically new, altered environment. Agha’s film catapulted her to Antarctica and even off planet, the journey there requiring that the filmmaker maneuver past memories and moments that might have been, culminating in her arrival in a empty expanse where she finds echoes to her own condition in the psychological consequences of polar exploration.
Being alone is even more difficult to navigate when the world outside is going through extraordinary hardships. There’s a lot to be concerned about: family and friend’s health, the brutal economic upheaval, other ways you or your loved ones have been affected by COVID-19. It’s hardly surprising then, that Agha transports herself and us to places untouched by the virus.
There’s a possible 27th birthday party, a trip to see new family members. Even the past is reformed to create alternate landscapes, There’s the Mango trees of her father’s childhood home in Pakistan, which Agha only knows from pictures, the daily rituals of admired and not so admired writers, that the filmmaker looks to in order to give shape to her otherwise formless mornings.
Of course, our generations, Agha’s and mine, have been prepping for disaster, even anticipating a possible future off world, for a while now. Managing catastrophe is something you have to learn in the age of mass shootings and climate change. With the fraying remnants of the social contract offering ever-diminishing possibilities for our own old-age, the sequence of places, remembered or imagined, that each of us has stored up, provide not just momentary escape, but the promise of a future infused with hopefulness. Nostalgia for what will never be is an aspect of modern life that didn’t begin with COVID.
For me, it’s art and memory more than internet rabbit holes that inform my travels. In response to Agha’s short film, I created a painting. It's built around an image that has been haunting my dreams in quarantine where I get sucked into a checkerboard printed tornado. Think of it as Alice in Wonderland, only you don’t fall quietly to sleep or go running after a white rabbit. Instead, a hole forms in the floor beneath you. It gets bigger and bigger, twisting, sucking you in, I painted Agha being drawn into a hole like this, her photographs turned into paintings, her memories even less reliable, less stable than they are in the world she crafted for us. Painting is my way to travel, memories turned unrecognizable, the past, present and future jumbled together, constantly rearranging themselves.
The paintings that Agha is being confronted with are stylized in a way that reminds us of well -known artists and make it appear as if she is walking through an actual gallery. The paintings reference teachers like Cezanne and kindred spirits such as Florine Stettheimer. There is a painting of Antarctica, a birthday celebration, a mango tree, and there are childlike faces, because childhood is a resource I feel both Agha and I draw heavily upon to manage the complex situations we face. This painting is intended to let one see the process of memory and imaginative interweaving, recall becoming the seed for new adventures. Reuse isn’t just a mantra for those who look to create a sustainable present. With so much in flux, and so much taken away, more and more everyday, what are we supposed to build our lives from other than refracted bits and pieces of a life already, almost lived?