Social Distancing #29
Ashley G. Garner @ashleyggarner 

Brooklyn, New York, April, 2020 .

“I am now on Day 26 of lock down here in Brooklyn, NY. Just days before the state had declared an emergency I had the biggest art show of my career at the Museum of the Moving Image and was preparing to fly across the country a few weeks later for another grand solo exhibition, but that all has been postponed now. It's surreal to look back at journal entries written weeks ago and how I felt that so much growth was happening for all of us. A trajectory of growth determined by constant movement. Now the world has stopped. NYC has stopped. No one ever thought that was possible, but here we all are, collectively stopping and trying to stop the spread of the virus as much as we can.

We are all so scared; unsure of how many will continue to die, unsure of the future, unsure of our income, unsure of how life in the city is going to look and operate when we are allowed to leave our homes again. But we are all connecting now more than ever as a creative community here. What is amazing to me is how much we are all feeling together through this. We are not exploring each other's differences, but our sameness, and finding ways to uplift each other through this. It feels like we are all holding each other's hand and I am very grateful for the internet for that.

We will never forget this time in history and I can already feel the ways that it has, and continues to change me. Not just through my art but through the way that I look at the natural world, the ways that I eat, the amount of waste that I create, the time I take for self care, the time I take to reach out to others and have a genuine conversation, and the ways that I educate myself on world events. Life is different now but I think that is an incredibly good thing. I wish it didn't have to take such great amount of pain and darkness for this to happen but I hope that we can all come out of it with a more global perspective and a sense of humanity that we pass on to the future generations. We are only but a piece of this grand puzzle and sometimes stopping is the only way to grow.” - Ashley G. Garner