Learning to Embrace the Non-Normal
By Doris Morgan Rueda
I left campus on March 12 around 11:45 am. It was unusually windy as I walked back to my car tightly gripping a stack of student exams out of fear of having to chase them around the parking lot one by one. The usual pre-Spring Break rush had begun but tangibly felt different. The expected chatty and fast-moving crowds of students across campus as they excitedly left their midterms for a week of vacation was nowhere to be found. Rather, the movement of people across campus was unnaturally somber. We were only hours away from being told that the campus would be closed due to COVID-19. I did not know that it would become the last time I was in my office, or a classroom even, for the remainder of the year.
I left campus for San Diego thinking I would spend Spring Break with my parents back in California and get a chance to grade exams, relax, and enjoy some homemade Colombian comfort food. I left campus thinking I would be back the following Monday to pick up my lecture on World War II with my students. I left campus assuming normalcy would be maintained and back in swing.
I saw the email while I waited for gas at the station in Barstow. The official University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) message announced our campus closure but was oddly brief and vague enough to make me think that perhaps we would be back in the classroom in the matter of weeks. However, a comment my doctoral advisor had made earlier that morning as we stood around the breakroom played back in my mind, “It sure seems like the world has changed overnight.” His casual remark proved true.
Lockdowns and Shutdowns
The duties of teaching took priority in those early days of the pandemic and lockdowns. It became easy, if not necessary, to exclusively focus on transitioning my class to an online format but also as a way to distract from a world that was increasingly unfamiliar and unrecognizable. Additionally, I had my own work to finalize. My dissertation proposal defense was coming up and my to-do list became a familiar distraction to deal with the rapidly changing reality across the globe. I have always been a person who deals with stress by digging further into work and tasks. It may seem counter-intuitive, but my reasoning has always been that it's hard to stress when you are too busy to be stressed.
But eventually the semester ends, the prospectus written, and deadlines are met. What are you left with then? Space and time. Space and time to think, stress, worry, and realize that there will not be a return to the classroom in the fall. That life will not be back to normal any time soon. Worse, you realize the word normal has lost any tangible meaning.
My usual coping mechanism suddenly had a little less power. I searched for something to help with the need to fill my time with work. In a moment of what I might describe as inspirational boredom or anxiety from being bored, I picked up my mother’s brand-new leaf blower. I reimagined this electrical tool of lawn maintenance into an experimental paint brush. On a normal day it was a way to clean the patio, but that day it became a piece of an art experiment.
What Tools Make an Artist?
Art had always been a space where I could take my feelings, my inspirations, and my interests and blend them into colors, shapes, and stories. Working on a painting is very much like working on historical research. It draws you in to the object at hand, it distorts your perception of time and the space around yourself as you become more focused on the object than your own body, and it engages your mind to imagine beyond words or the physical.
That day I stood on my parent’s patio with the leaf blower in hand with the goal to turn it into art and feeling that mental space take over. I made the decision to trust my instinct and accept whatever emerged. Rummaging through my mother’s art supply cabinet I found the other necessary tools for this bizarre experiment: a couple of stretched canvas frames, some acrylic paint, a couple disposable paper cups, and the bright blue tarp my parents have owned since probably the Clinton administration. With the items perilously balanced in my arms, I ran outside and threw them onto the grass. The tarp would protect the grass and patio floor from spilled paint and the paper cups would serve as a makeshift palate. My artistic plan was less of a plan and more of a hope and a whim. With the leaf blower in one hand and the cups of watered-down paint in the other, the experiment began.
Transformed Tools, Finding Art in the Everyday. Photos/Doris Morgan Rueda.
I would alternate, throwing the paint onto the canvas and using the leaf blower to manipulate the flow of the colors. Sometimes I would throw several colors together before using the leaf blower to see what would emerge. Other times I would circle the canvas and begin the process from another angle. My sole focus was on the distribution of colors and growth of patterns and shapes. In that moment, which I later learned had lasted hours, my mind only perceived the art in front of me. The artistic process, which is deeply focused and analytical, is also calming. The anxiety over the loss of normalcy I had been carrying and burying for weeks slipped away.
When Mechanisms Fail, Instincts Prevail
The paintings that emerged from that session were in no way my best work or even my favorite work. Rather they represented a reconnection with myself, my senses, and the beginning of a healthier coping mechanism for managing life in a pandemic. Working myself into the ground with school and teaching as a form of distraction was destroying the joy I truly find as a historian and graduate student. The pandemic forced me to confront one of my worst tendencies, something I have carried with me for years. The drive to create normal in non-normal circumstances, by pushing myself to work harder and on more projects, became self-destructive. It is a habit that has long been perceived by others as a positive trait, something I have been commended for in job evaluations and recommendations, but realistically a trait that took a toll on me over years. The pandemic, with its ability to create seemingly endless empty time, put my behavior on full display. The consequences, insomnia, anxiety, and fear of not doing enough, were now impossible to ignore regardless of however many projects I volunteered for or Zoom meetings I attended.
The First Experiment.
The Second Experiment
The day after my experiment, I woke up feeling unusually relieved. I did not frantically check my email or run to my laptop. Rather, I walked over to the canvas that I had left drying outside. Coffee in hand, I spent the morning inspecting them and appreciating the images that appeared in the leaf blown paint. The first (above) reminded me of medieval stained glass in Catholic cathedrals while the second felt like an overhead view of the ocean and the breaking of waves. I found myself turning the paintings, excited to find new shapes in them from a new perspective. The joy of the painting came from releasing an expected result and embracing the discovery of the experimental process. Embracing the non-normal of art transformed into an embracing the non-normal of the pandemic.
Embrace the Weird
Releasing the need for an orderly process opened a burst of creativity in me. The leaf blower art experiments catapulted me into experimenting with digital collage and digital art. I took photos of those same experiments and used digital editing tools to distort and warp them. Next, I incorporated historical pulp fiction covers, Soviet posters, and court photos (items that had also fascinated me as an artist and historian) to create digital collages that played with color, text, and pop culture images. Like the experiments with the leaf blower, I had little technique or plan. In fact, my digital editing was more an experiment of clicking buttons to see what would happen. Again, feeling free from needing a specific result emboldened me to just try whatever was in my grasp and opened new doors of what was possible and what I was able to create.
Tangible Meets Digital. A Sample of Art Transformed.
Transforming art into new art also challenged me to reconsider how I thought about the role of art in my life. While previously, I solely thought of my art as a way to de-stress from work and school, a self-care practice above all. I was re-examining this belief. Did my art only need to exist for myself? Why wasn’t my art more present in my approach to history? My approach to myself and my career? Why was my art kept separate from my career as a historian? Then the perfect moment to examine these questions arrived. My dissertation proposal defense.
The Profoundly Purple Proposal Defense
I had been working on my text of my proposal for months prior to the pandemic. The roughly 25-page-length description of my eventual doctoral dissertation described the evidence I would need to gather, the existing literature that my project was based in, as well as its theory and methodology. I wrote it expecting an in-person traditional defense, seated around the history conference table with my committee asking me questions while I answered defending the strength of my project—all performed in front of a live audience of fellow graduate students. COVID-19 made this impossible.
Transitioning to a virtual format proved simple enough. In thinking of how to present my materials virtually to a group of Zoom boxes, I realized the importance of the visual to this wordy document I was going to discuss. History, and in particular my field of legal history, is usually a text heavy practice. The written words of historical actors are vital to our understanding of the past. However, historical people and contemporary people have never lived in a text-heavy world. Rather the visual has historically been of greater importance and access to people. Symbols, art, and performance take precedent over text in many ways. So why not in this event? Why not my proposal defense?
I began playing with pulp fiction covers and photos of historical juvenile justice courts within my collages. The courts that delinquents encountered, the fashion youth wore as signs of rebellion, or the provocative images from films and books teenagers indulged in without their parents’ permission; these were just as much a part of my project as the legal documents, the case files, and newspapers. It seemed right that these images should be a part of my project. The collages came easily; they fit naturally into my presentation alongside a discussion of chapters, theories, and evidence. The conversation was no longer just about historical youth, and the world they lived in, but with those youth. Their voices came through in their clothes, hair, even their poses in photographs with friends or in a courtroom. Their voices were present; we just needed to learn their form of communication.
A Fuller Picture of the Art in History.
The presentation was a hit. Blending art and history raised new questions and new possibilities. I had never seen what I had just done before, and whereas before it would have made me cautious, I found myself excited that there was nothing like this. No normal to be found. I was liberated from the need to follow a pre-designed process or expect a certain result. COVID-19 held my subconscious love of normalcy to the flame and exposed the limitations it had strategically placed around me when I stopped paying attention. With the normalcy gone, I found my identity as artist historian in the pandemic.
Doris Morgan Rueda is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), in the Department of History. Her research focuses on the development of juvenile justice systems in the American Southwest with a special interest in international juvenile justice and race in the 20th century. Her work uses a transnational approach to explore the representation and racialization of juvenile delinquency in border towns through legal systems and popular images. Additionally, she is a multimedia artist who has had her work included in several exhibits. Her work blends traditional acrylic painting with digital collages using historical photographs and popular culture. A wide range of experiences with history, teaching, art, and technology has influenced her work and allowed her to pursue the intersection of scholarship, art, and activism in innovative and creative ways.
Prior to UNLV, she completed her B.A. in Criminology, Law & Society from the University of California, Irvine in 2013 and her M.A. in History & Digital Media from California State University, San Marcos in 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of San Diego History, Journal of the West, the Acentos Review, and more. Additionally, she has presented research across the United States, as well as internationally.
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