In My Room: Student Reflections on the Time of Isolation
In My Room exhibition artworks.
By Sean C. Jones
“In this world I lock out
All my worries and fears”
- In My Room by Brian Wilson
I was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the late 70s and early 80, when I was a pre-teen, the city had less than half the population it has now and vast areas of empty desert. The city was focused on entertaining adults, not the children who lived here. Unable to drive, I spent a lot of time in my room. We had no internet or cable, and my siblings and I shared one phone line. I spent most of my time in my room, reading books and listening to vinyl records or the radio. I often felt bored.
I have been teaching art for about 25 years in Las Vegas, currently at a magnet middle school of art. When the pandemic lockdown happened, I was taken by surprise. I worried about how the students would handle being stuck at home, not realizing it would last for an entire year. I felt empathy for them because of all the school and life events the students would be missing. A decision was made by my school district that students did not have to turn on their cameras during the online classes. Middle school and high school students soon figured out they could log onto the online classes to be “present,” and then leave their computer to do something else. I received very few completed art projects online. I pleaded with students to do the art projects, not just for a grade, but to have something to do.
I was asked by Nevada Humanities to curate a show with my middle school art students about their experience with the pandemic lockdown. It seemed a pretty intense subject for 11- to 13-year-olds. I anticipated art works of doom and gloom—melting faces of depression or angry images of loss. Unlike most of my other art projects, I asked the students to begin by writing a brief “artist’s statement” about what they planned to create.
“I was bored. I watched TV.”
“I was bored. I played video games.”
“I was bored, there was nothing to do.”
Almost all of the statements began with "I was bored. . . " I had anticipated diatribes about loneliness and depression, but (at least consciously) this was not something the students wanted to or could express. It appeared they were actively suppressing any memories or details of the pandemic shutdown (which I found in this process that I am guilty of too). We all hit PAUSE on our lives. It was like a year on hold, filled with nothing. It seems that most of us actively erased memories of being locked in. Many students wanted to make art of the TV shows or video games that filled their lost year. While I'm a fan of Pop Art, I was panicked that all I was going to have a show were images of SpongeBob and Mine Craft.
We started over. I asked the students to really think about things from the pandemic shutdown other than the media. We collectively began remembering owning a variety of masks, washing our groceries when we brought them home, missing the holiday gatherings, hand sanitizer, and one student suddenly remembered that his mother had gotten into the whole making-bread-from-scratch craze (which I had forgotten about too). There were still some students who resisted digging below the shallow cover of "I was bored, I watched TV," but a majority of the students began to recall actual memories of what I think future generations will call "The Lost Year."
I began to realize that adults have been projecting our own emotions and thoughts on what we think the students experienced. During the lockdown, I thought about all the wonderful life events they were missing stuck at home (meeting friends, going to movies or concerts). I assumed they were all dangerously depressed and morose. Overall, they weren't. Essentially, you cannot miss what you have never had. The students may have felt a genuine loss at not seeing friends in person or going out and doing things, but (especially for middle school students) they simply did not know what they were missing out on. Those life-changing moments adults remember from that period in our lives are anomalies—unpredictable and rare. Being a pre-teen (who cannot drive) at home with your family before the shutdown is not much different from being home with your family during the shutdown. The dominant emotional memory from them was boredom.
One of my favorite stories from the second go-round of beginning this project was a student who wrote that had an uncle that was traveling to El Salvador. His uncle had a new dog, and he bought a container to take the dog on the airplane. The container turned out to be too small for the dog, so the uncle told the student he could keep the dog. The dog helped the boy get through the lockdown. I asked the student, “So, you’re going to do a drawing of the dog, right?” And he replied, “No. I’m going to draw the container, because without the container I wouldn’t have had a dog.”
I was surprised by the overall positive memories the students had of the lockdown. Taking care of family members, the friends they were allowed to see, cooking with the family. Students seemed to focus on the silver lining of their experience, though they might have been avoiding their true feelings from that time.
I know that most people want me to tell them how therapeutic doing this project was for the students. Unfortunately, the most therapeutic thing for them would have been doing their art during the lockdown. They would have been less bored. Art is therapy. Many accomplished people have taken on art as a way of filling time and having a sense of purpose, from Winston Churchill to actor Tony Curtis. I hope the students begin to realize that creating art is a cure for boredom.
In My Room: Student Reflections on the Time of Isolation is open to the public for viewing by appointment only Tuesdays through Thursdays from 1 to 4 pm and until 9 pm the first Friday of the month for First Friday events at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery, 1017 South 1st Street, #190 in Las Vegas. In-person viewing will close on May 24, 2023. Contact Bobbie Ann Howell at bahowell@nevadahumanities.org or 702-800-4670 to make a viewing appointment. This exhibition will remain viewable online.
Sean C. Jones is a Las Vegas native, an art educator, and guest curator of In My Room: Student Reflections on the Time of Isolation. Jones has taught art in public schools since 1998 at all grade levels. Jones' art feeds on the collective memories of oversaturated popular culture. He works in traditional media to rescue the modern iconography from the glut of digital redundancy.
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Photo courtesy of Sean C. Jones.