Pandemic to Warrior

The series “Pandemic” began by creating and photographing small paper sculptures in a sort of broken Mobius. The composition makes physical the moment of spinning to a new existence like our global population. I began the series in January 2020 before citizens were told of the COVID-19 virus and its health implication.

The Result:

While transitioning into isolation and listening to the global attack of the virus, I continued to reflect on the different stages of our predicament. As a result, the series has evolved from Suspension, Cocoon, Breathe, Need, Vaccine, Conversation, and now the Warrior. The latter is about organizing the war on climate change.

Statement:

While we try to balance our lives suspended from the universal spider web, we see levitation and a new world arriving.

I live in a suspended existence. Moving through my art studio, I bump into things in my 3d world. I get bruises; they turn blue inside my body. Without knowing the Covid-19 virus was beginning in China, Italy, and America in November 2019, I cut strips of paper and rolled them— origami without folds became sculptures I photographed and manipulated. While under orders to quarantine and receiving international news of loss, poor decisions, and chaos, these suspended creations countered the downward spiral of emotions we seem to share in common. By mainly using a centered composition to produce balance and to aid our psyches, each image became an icon.

The Suspension series began as a Möbius strip, also called the twisted cylinder. It is a one-sided surface with no boundaries to symbolize continuity within a finite entity. The strip is just a strip of paper, turned and taped together. It only has one side, so an ant walking along the strip eventually returns to where he started. If we metaphorically interpret the ant not as returning to a point in space, but a point in time, then it alludes to time travel.

My strips of paper began as the traditional Mobius strips then quickly became dissembled and reassembled. In the dawn of our new age, reassembling is the norm. Distinguished from the old normal we knew.

I view the "Suspension" series as a precursor for a world-altering change. Surreal and symbolic at once, the series reveals a new light on the horizon, beyond the incubation of our minds. Each image has intricate negative and positive spaces addressing the physical moment of rising and then floating off again. "Suspension 7" communicates softness, a gentle horizon atop which rests an illusion of calmer skies or the afterlife. A nurse's cap, an iris, or a skull, though unintentional, the work seems to relate to Georgia O'Keeffe's "Black Iris" 1927, or "Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills" 1935, a frighting time when America perched for war. June 2020

The Covid-19 epidemic has changed each of us. We cope with leaders' ever-changing assessments of solutions with best practices, less market food, and mounting economic pressure. The very essence of our existence has changed forever.

2023

Now we are warriors watching the changes, minute and grand. We rise to conquer climate change with all our strength.

Bio:

Multimedia California artist Teresa Camozzi, born in Rabat, Morocco, immigrated to the United States when five years old. Her artwork evokes the complexity of Islam, while her immigration shades her political view. 

Her mentor was Ernst Posey while studying at San Francisco's Academy of Art.

She is known internationally for large-scale permanent public artworks; she combines representational and abstract images via conventional art methods (photography, drawing) and computer technology. One example is a seven-story installation near Shanghai, China; another is at Miami International Airport. In addition, she earned the National 2009 Americans for the Arts Award for public work in Plano, Texas.

Her work of fine art and documentary photography includes: "Almost Free," "Sonoma Fire Aftermath 2017," and "Pandemic." She is currently documenting the Afghan resettlement program in Sacramento, CA, and Reach for Home, Healdsburg, CA.