#HateIsAVirus
#HateIsAVirus Selfie - 6/3/20 @ Resonator Institute, 9:30 p.m.
Mural dates and location: April 29th to June 3rd in Norman, Oklahoma
Mural description for the visually impaired utilizing screen readers or refreshable Braille displays, and/or anyone else who is interested in an extra dose of background:
On two large window panes, that are opposite a sushi shop and a tattoo parlor within the Walker Arts District of downtown Norman, I painted a pill-like shape on Resonator Institutes’s West-side windows. I’m standing in front and to the left. It is night, so there is a little graininess in the image.
The black window frame that supports the two large panes of glass is a natural dividing line to bisect the oblong-shaped pill. There is the neon sign of the sushi restaurant reflected in the windows. It very minimally obscures the painted black text, that reads: “We’ll Get Through This Together”. This phrase was painted in an all-caps font and had been centered in the oblong, yellow-pill half, which under evening conditions looks like a pale yellow. I chose the black pigment for contrast more than anything else. Under daylight conditions the yellow I chose to mix comes off as a gold yellow and is a mixed application of acrylic and tempera pigments. Yellow is a deliberate choice that may be observed on its own as a pleasing color to the eye, that the viewer may associate with other feelings, or it may be seen as a color that encompasses various contemporary and historically-shaded meanings.
A reverse image of the mural in daylight conditions as taken from the inside of Resonator.
As the viewer reads this window mural from left to right, as that is an English-language bias as I am an English-speaking writer and reader, I painted an oblong, white-pill shape to mirror the yellow-pill shape. It is an opposite with no real resemblance to its mirror twin other than they share a shape that forms a whole.
Within that framing, white pigment as negative space, the white contrasts with the red, purple, and pink tempera paints that form the round, spiked, bodies of the Novel Corona Virus. The color effect in daylight looked more magenta. At night it looked more red. There were seven of these magenta and red, viral bodies depicted in the white space. They ranged in size from small, medium and large. The choice to paint seven of them is a little nod to “The Seventh Seal.” I had read about Sweden’s Covid-19 “strategy“ at some point and thought it foolish. For those unfamiliar with “The Seventh Seal”, it is a Swedish film about medieval, plague times and I’ll leave it at that.
Beneath the white-pill half I wrote out the hashtag: “Hate is a virus”. This was a direction to anyone with social media to look it up and familiarize themselves with the We Are Uprisers’ #hateisavirus campaign. I used white chalk marker to apply this message.
Daylight photo of the mural by Curtis Jones. This photo is also feature in Resonator’s May 2020 Zine.
For the intensely curious, please click through to the complimentary blog post on Resonator.space about the organization’s art activism. There is also a blog post written in April 2019 about Resonator’s commitment to being an anti-racist space.