"Covid Dreams" exhibit comes to Inkberry Books

Like most of us, local artist David Bjorkman watched with anxiety as coronavirus crept across the globe during the early part of 2020, spreading increasingly vivid images of suffering, confusion, and death. For Bjorkman and his partner, Victoria Thomas, the growing threat was personal. Five of their family members are medical professionals and would be confronting the mystifying respiratory disease on the front lines, potentially affecting themselves and others in their intimate circles. So as February turned to March, Bjorkman's thoughts were increasingly occupied by the coming threat and whether his loved ones would survive the onslaught.

To manage his worry, Bjorkman turned to two familiar friends: art and humor. He was moved to create a surrealist collage "Self-portrait with Virus Deflector Hat" after his daughter was exposed to COVID-19 while attending an infected patient, and went into quarantine. Hoping to tease some light out of a very dark situation, Bjorkman juxtaposed an absurdist image from a 19th century woodcut with color-saturated images of the spiky coronavirus from an electron microscope, resulting in a colorful, hallucinatory effect. He then gave it to his daughter, who escaped her brush with the virus and headed back to the ICU.

"I made it for her because gentle humor is healing," he said.

Bjorkman was back at it when another daughter was on the frontlines, creating "COVID-19 Responders," a collage featuring Hawaiian surfing imagery and the message, "We Calm the Storm, By Surfing the Tsunami." Then, the first daughter was fitted for a respirator suit, so he created "N95 Total Body Mask™," which comes with more modern features than the image would suggest.

"Mine comes with Wi-Fi, NetFlix and a wet bar," Bjorkman explained. "It also features a loading dock for non-contact pizza delivery."

Over the next few weeks, he would create 18 total collages, all featuring brightly colored images of the viruses mixed with the anachronistic and often weird black and white woodcuts.

"The process is fluid," he said. "....Some take half an hour to complete, others take days, while some are never finished. Some happen like magic, others don't. It has taken me an hour to cut out a single image, using a tiny pair of scissors and heavy concentration, to avoid lopping off an ear."

He titled the series "Covid Dreams", to reflect both the eerie new normal and the collective emotional reaction that seems to grip us most in our sleep.

"There have been reports that a lot of people are having really heavy dreams during the Covid period," Bjorkman said. "And also it's just the ongoing surreal quality of the life we're leading at this time."

Each piece in the series portrays someone either battling the virus directly or falling into one of the many contradictions that battling the virus has conjured.

"I've continued on with the subtle wit," he said. "Romeo and Juliet" get busted for non-conforming social distancing. The "Perseid Potato Shower" gets cancelled when one spud doesn't have a mask. An "immortal youth" dances on the head of a virus. It's to shift people's perception of the dreaded virus from fear to something manageable through a little bit of visual humor."

Bjorkman is exhibiting a selection from the Covid Dreams collection at Inkberry Books (7960 Niwot Rd.) through July 31. Co-owner Gene Hayworth is thrilled to have original artwork back on his walls after a four-month absence, and thinks Bjorkman's series is an appropriate way to re-usher art back into public spaces.

"The pandemic has been very difficult on us, as it obviously has on a lot of other businesses," he said. "So this is just a way to emphasize the difficulty that we've all gone through but it has sort of a humorous spin. I find it very entertaining, and it adds a little bit of lightness to the trauma that we're going through."

Creating the collages represents something of a departure for Bjorkman. He earned an MFA in painting, but spent the bulk of his career working as an international photojournalist. He met Thomas, a writer, while on assignment, and the two later settled in Niwot to publish books and create original artwork.

Bjorkman has been working mostly as a photographer and publisher for more than 20 years, with a style that tends decidedly towards minimalism in both media, as in his Liquid Abstracts series. He has sometimes turned to collages as a "counterbalance" to the absence of abstraction in minimalism, but it isn't his main outlet.

When the pandemic emerged, however, he found that his feelings about it didn't lend themselves to the flat colors, and straight geometrical lines of his minimalist work. He was also staying close to home out of concern for his health, a decision that limited his photographic range.

"Creating those paintings is very, very precise and austere," he said. "The collage is much more fluid and possibly humorous, so for me it worked great, because I got an outlet for the humor that was different than my painting and now my photography. ...Covid Dreams is the first time I've gotten into really, really splashy, saturated colors."

Bjorkman said work on the Covid Dreams series is ongoing and will be for the duration of the pandemic. Ultimately, he hopes the collages will help people find a little bit of escape when everything seems bleak.

"I'm creating these collages because we're all in this together," Bjorkman says. "I'll continue until Covid no longer hovers over us like a mothership. Until then, I'm illustrating a pandemic."

Individual prints from the Covid Dreams collection are available for $20 online or at Inkberry. See more of Bjorkman's work at his website.