About the Installation

The Inspiration for “Out of Lockstep”

By Anna Cole, Artistic Director

When the lockdowns began, everything about my life circumstances said that I should be on the pro-lockdown side: I lived in Brooklyn, I worked in a creative field, I had camped at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and everyone around me had a raging case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.

Being on that “side” felt wrong though: I couldn’t sleep at night or stay focused during the day.  My friends who were still in the city wanted to have “Zoom Happy Hour” regularly, and I had less and less I could say during those video chats that sounded hopeful and upbeat. When I moved into my art studio in downtown Rochester NY, I couldn’t open the boxes I’d packed to leave the city without crying.  I checked the news obsessively for the signal that the pandemic was over and I could live again.

As “two weeks to flatten the curve” became almost a year, I began to envy the people who had died from COVID-19 I was so miserable.

I started to say things on social media like, “I don’t care if I live or die any more; I’m ready to roll the dice if that’s what it takes to be social again,” and people responded by lecturing me about how that wouldn’t be fair to all the people I’d infect and kill in the process, and how I was a terrible, selfish, disease-spreading person for wanting to do things like dance in public again.  The message that I was nothing but a potential disease vector and didn’t deserve to live was constantly being shoved down my throat, and I still considered myself to be on their “side”.

I was so desperate to find the will to live that I decided to see what the “other side” had to say, and I found out that most anti-lockdown activists weren’t the uneducated, racist, sexist, homophobic, Bible-thumping, cousin-snogging Nazis I’d been told they were.

They were just normal people dealing honestly with the same grief and despair I felt— and they cared about each other as people, not as potential disease vectors.

I realized that I didn’t need permission from the “Experts” to live again— I only needed courage to do it.

Breaking out of my old echo chamber liberated me but created a new problem: I knew it was only a matter of time until I got “canceled”.

I was doing naughty things like sneaking over state lines to party, dancing in bars when that was outlawed in New York, wearing sheer silk chiffon masks— or even no masks— in public, reading things I wasn’t supposed to read, talking to people I wasn’t supposed to talk to, and going to anti-lockdown protests.  In a particularly surreal moment, I saw some friends unexpectedly protesting alongside me, while other old friends marched aggressively in a counter-protest wearing all black. 

I refused the vaccine.  The “non-pharmaceutical” methods had side effects like making me barely laugh or smile for months on end and destroying my will to live, so why should I risk the side effects of something more invasive?  At least I could stop “distancing” and take off the mask, but I wouldn’t be able to un-inject the shots if they were in me and I regretted the decision the way I regretted initially following the orders to mask and distance.

People I knew who used to loudly chant, “all cops are bastards, ACAB!” and “No justice no peace, fuck the police” were now cheering for the police they were beating and arresting anti-lockdown protesters and the unvaccinated.  People I thought I could trust were condescending and insulting at best, downright hateful at worst when I tried to explain my point of view.  I ghosted on almost everyone I knew to avoid any further abuse.

Businesses I had been loyal to for years didn’t allow me in.  I always loved visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but in 2021, police were forcibly removing unvaccinated people from the premises.

And I thought, “wouldn’t it be great to have an art gallery where people can get in only with an obviously, hilariously fake vaccine card?  I could put out craft supplies like the ones we used to use in the early childhood classes I taught— people could draw on them with crayons and glue silly decorations on, and we could not only eliminate the division vaxports caused, but also laugh at how stupid the hygiene theater was.”

What would be in the show once they entered?

Faces.

I had been deeply moved by Giorgio Agamben’s essay, “The Face and Death” when I read it:

“If the living lose their face, the dead become only numbers, which, in so far as they had been reduced to their pure biological life, must die alone and without funerals. And if the face is the place where, before any discourse, we communicate with our fellow men, then even the living, deprived of their relationship with the face, are irreparably alone, however much they try to communicate with digital devices.”

I could tell the stories of other people who were affected by lockdowns— especially those who had been silenced before.  I could show the thing that had been taboo to see in public for far too long in New York and countless other places— uncovered faces!  I could show others what I had learned in January 2021: that the dissidents weren’t monsters, plague rats, granny killers, and fascists.  They were normal people who had concerns about second order effects like deaths of despair and an entire generation not being educated.

From there, the idea grew until it could fill several rooms of a gallery with different themes and tell the story of what had really happened.