Sol Luongo 

URUGUAY

 Los Angeles, California

Instagram: @soundsofliberty

artist statement : 

I was visiting family in Uruguay when the outbreak started in LA.  

I was celebrating my birthday  jumping and dancing to Black Flag in a big crowd of people and sweat.  I shook the body water out  of my own hair and walked to the bar to get a drink.  Droplets from all the humans were making the air moist and a little heavy to breathe.  The virus was still distant news. And I don't watch the news. A friend texted me a very cryptic message :“happy birthday,  bring toilet paper ”.  I didn’t get the joke or the warning .  I was flying back home to LA the next morning. A friend gave me a mask before boarding.  She is always over prepared. The kind that brings an umbrella to a pool party.  While waiting for take off I caught up with what had started happening here and began thinking about isolation and toilet paper, then started sketching this.  

I went to work the next day.  I make and serve drinks for drunks to be.  It was a Friday night but the bar was oddly and eerily  quiet.   Everyone seemed a little confused and afraid of each other. The air was heavy but in a very different way. 

Two days later everything shut down.  And I took that sketch to canvas.  

 We trash our world.  We devour and consume We are a virus.  We duplicate just like one.   We are needy and greedy.

 But there’s always a chance, an alternative, something to look forward to on the horizon and somewhere our own bubble is taking us to.  

 We can also have goals and determination, inner peace but a hard fist to fight what attacks us and make everything a little  better if we want to.  

We can have a direction. 

 Yet at the end we are still all alone. 

Today is June 26 and yesterday I went back to work.  Cheers!

Sol Luongo