Spring 2020 at the Park

I took this photograph at my local park in the spring of 2020, when the world was either hidden away indoors or venturing cautiously into parks and other outdoor spaces in search of a semblance of pre-pandemic life. Yet even here, all the swings were cordoned off.

At first, I worried the image was too literal: childhoods halted mid-motion, the suspension of play, the social unease born of biological mistrust, and the existential weight of illness and death. A former professor once remarked that “literal art”—work whose meaning is too easily grasped—risks becoming mere illustration, an instructive sign rather than a layered experience. That idea lingered with me as I prepared to present this photograph.

However, the visceral responses of viewers began to shift my thinking. People spoke of sadness, melancholy, disappointment, entropy, and stillness—emotions that defined 2020 and demanded our attention. I found myself reconsidering the power of directness. Some of the most resonant conceptual works communicate with striking clarity while avoiding self-consciousness. I think, for instance, of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s billboards depicting an unmade bed, the imprint of absent bodies commemorating the toll of the early HIV/AIDS crisis, or the stark, declarative language of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms.

Sometimes, art meets you head-on. And sometimes, that directness is precisely what gives it its force.

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Playground with slide and swings cordoned off with yellow caution tape, surrounded by palm trees in a park at dusk.