During my solo isolation in NYC, I would sit down for 1-2 hours at night and paint with acrylics on a manila folder. It was cathartic trying to paint through my emotions, painting images, some heavy with meaning and symbolism for myself and my state of mind. Thanks to art, I was able to imbue an iota of flow into my day, during a time that I was riddled with uncertainty and anxiety.

In the first series of the photographic prints I created, the manila folder retained a place of prominence, as the folder contained multitudes. It was even the source of heated disagreements with friends, as I could not imagine understanding the imagery without the folder. To me, the manila folder represented the story that I couldn’t verbally explain. All together, my “filing cabinet” of my isolation contained more than 140 different manila folders. The stress, the anxiety, the depression, the inability to think, the yearning to experience the world outside again, the beauty, the art, everything. All of those feelings were embedded in every piece I created. Some were more explicit about their meaning than others.

To borrow a phrase from world of technology, there was a lot of metadata associated with every photographic print of the isolation folders.

One of the pieces I created was a portrait of Albert Einstein, called the Relativity of Time, was a bit of a meditation on the idea how how time became irrelevant, but was somehow going faster and slower at the same time.

I began to “remix” my own art. I created the piece E=MC²^⁴ which also carried a lot of additional meaning. While it was obviously an homage to Andy Warhol’s idea of multiplying celebrity, it also was created after I decided to move to Chicago, and the unforeseeable monotonous future of living in isolation in NYC had a foreseeable end date. 

Time could begin to move again. Time had meaning. There was something to be excited about and to look forward to. It meant concurrently having multiple feelings about time — anticipation, anxiety, excitement, and just wishing for the ability to travel time and space, so I could just be in my new home already.

And then I moved to Chicago. A lot changed. I was able to think again. I was able to plan. I was starting again. Learning new things. Sketching. Inking. Attempting watercolors and portraits and more.

I wanted to be simple and basic.

So I looked at the remixed piece and asked myself what would happen if I would break it apart. If I would strip it down to the most basic core — a piece without any metadata, any special meanings, any story. Like an atom, with its protons, neutrons and electrons, this piece would have different variables like colors, but it would be as pared down as possible.

But then I printed out four of these, and framed them next to each other, and saw a new creation. I printed out three more, and again, it was a different piece.

On its own, a single atom is nothing. But when combined, atoms comprise each of the elements on the periodic table, which in turn, are found in everything in our world. It can be a building block for creating our lives anew.

It opened up a world of possibility. On one hand, there could be nothing more simple, on the other hand, it’s infinitely complex. As a mathematician friend of mine pointed out, there are more possible combinations of Atomic Einsteins in the “Random” Einstein  (12^81) than there are atoms in the known universe (~10^78).

This is exactly what Einstein did; he gave people permission to imagine. He gave people a symbol of what the eminently curious looks like. To conceive of numerous dimensions we hadn’t previously considered.

I wanted to emulate that. I’m not the only artist in this piece. Whoever buys it and becomes a collaborator and chooses colors and an arrangement is creating a work of art that may be unlike anyone else’s. Anyone who hangs it on their wall is able to think about being curious. It can transport them to a time and place where the world looks different.