Tereza Swanda

Touchstone

Touchstone is a community engagement project in which the artist asks those affected by Covid to email her photos of loved ones they need to hold, either in grief or while in the hospital. In an era in which hundreds of thousands of people are dying, Touchstone reconsiders the processes of death and mourning. Daily news tolls the numbers, which represent something unimaginable. To make the loss tangible and bring Covid death ‘home’, Swanda asks participants to share in the grieving captured by these works, even as we distance physically. For Swanda, the intimacy of painting flips distancing. Of course, surviving Covid in the US may be far easier than surviving the Police and systemic racism: As a collective grieving, Swanda also paints those that have been massacred at the hands of the police and migrants that remain unnamed.

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