In 2020, the rug was pulled out from under us, both individually and collectively. It’s safe to say, things changed. At the time, I was living in an industrial loft on the edge of Chinatown in Los Angeles, California. I liked the place all right, but I knew I wasn’t permanent there. I wasn’t even permanent in Los Angeles, though I had been there for 30 years. That was the beauty of the place—impermanence. I was happy to remain permanently impermanent, for I truly love the city, and I never took seriously the idea of leaving. But when lockdown hit, so too was ground broken on an massive new construction site right next door. Mine was a miserable lockdown of constant noise, zero nature and no ventilation. And so I began to dream of leaving. The reasons I had for staying—namely, my career—had been entirely wiped out by Covid—for instance, the gallery that had scheduled a solo show for me in October of 2020 was no longer extant in October of 2020. I, like so many others, was left rudderless and seemingly futureless as well.
In the spring of 2021, when it was finally marginally safe to travel, I returned to my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, to see my family, and, while there, I found a house to buy. It was surely impulsive and reactive, but I certainly wasn’t the only one making these sorts of impulsively reactive moves due to the upheavals the virus caused. I just did it, I jettisoned my beloved life in L.A. and betook myself “home.” “The Haunted Countryside” is the final body of work I produced in Los Angeles, and it presents a kind of dreamscape, a ghostly dreamscape of my projections of what it would be like to return to live in my small hometown after 40 years away. The prospect was a little scary.