During quarantine, we essentially stopped eating at restaurants or going to bars. Consequentially our money stacked up, even though we felt it was important to support a few of our favorite local places. We supported:

Bob’s Pizza
Yummy Thai
China Dragon
Cinqo Rabanitos
H Chehade Food & Liquors
The Herbal Care Center
Jumping Bean Coffee’s “L” Cafecito

In lieu of going out to eat, we called in orders and walked to pick them up, maybe once a week. The liquor store saw some business from us, the dispensary did as well.

The coffee shop was very small, being under the elevated train tracks, and so allowed only two customers to be inside the shop area at the same time, and those customers usually occupied polar sides of its single room. We didn’t get coffee to go much; instead, we bought bags of whole beans when they had them, or grounds when they didn’t.

To gather cooking ingredients, we shopped at:

ALDI
Cermak Produce
Guero Supermercados #8

Mostly we cooked in the kitchen to sustain ourselves. It has an east-facing window, like the bathroom and the water heater room. Through the summer mornings, this window was our primary source of natural light in the kitchen, and for that little bit of light I remain grateful.

Two days related only by their having fallen within the quarantine. On those days, I stood next to my tripod, shifting feet, pacing, reading, getting high and pressing the shutter button every ten seconds. I made a point of not producing according to an economical model, which is to say by weight of suffering. Rather, I measured the value of my time by how glad I was, how thankful I was for the privilege to find familiar ground with my shifting feet, to feel cool and crumby kitchen tiles beneath me, for the reflective escape afforded by paperback fiction, for marijuana's efficacy against chronic anxiety, and to be the owner of a camera. Finally, this work is a letter to a future me about what we did during the quarantine. We watched our days go by on screens, and sometimes I would watch the sunlight as it drew across objects in our cheap apartment, and I would be reminded that I was hurtling through hard vacuum on a rock of coalesced space dust, and nobody has ever told me why, but when I saw sunlight crawling slowly I was soothed and reassured. Curtis Mayfield sang, "...just remember to be thankful/for what you got..." and I am, but I'm also thankful to have witnessed so many quiet little miracles in a time of plague, of war, of injustice, inequality, fear and violence, pestilence and greed...this is part of the story of how America stumbled and why: that we, all of us, watched it happen on little screens, day by day. And so here it is: days passing by on your screen.

A Year if a Day is a consideration of stopped motion during the COVID-19 quarantine. To examine the passing of time, to gain assurance that the Earth is still turning, this is a collection of stop-motion looping GIFs made while sheltering at home. In the event of their installation, they’d loop on phones, laptops, television screens, monitors, and as projections in a bid to convey how the great many of us watched our days pass on screens. We worked from home, our dread and anger grew as we scrolled on social media, and to preserve our sanity we retreated into television and video games. Likewise, A Year if a Day, the title referencing a common idiom used to express disbelief about the passing of time, asks viewers to watch days pass on screens.

A Year if a Day is a project in progress, and will endure in its production until the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine in the US comes to a close.