On March 16, the CDC reported that there had been 966,835 deaths from COVID in the USA. Imagine if everyone in Austin died over the period between March 11, 2020. and March 16, 2022. That number is staggering and hard for me to visualize. (That’s why I compare it to the population of a whole city.)
Ruhee Maknojia chose a gentler way, perhaps, to visualize the carnage. She has used a red flower rubber stamp to mark each fatality in large sheets of parchment paper. This work is called One Flower - One Life. Here is the earliest sheet from this grim project.
The first few days show a small number of daily deaths, but the number grows exponentially.
This installation is on view at Box 13. Viewers wander among somewhat ghostly, sepulchral hanging parchments. One Flower - One Life doesn’t visualize all 966,835 deaths—that would require a much larger gallery. It shows instead red flowers for each life lost to COVID between March 11, 2020 and July 24, 2020. A total of 137,678 lives.
As a means of visualizing this distressing data, if works pretty well. (Otherwise, one might imagine the entire population of Dayton, Ohio vanishing over a four month period in 2020.)
The use of a rubber stamp to represent each life lost makes me think that the labor of making all those images must have been tedious and perhaps a little painful. But the image, a red flower, also makes one think of the poem “In Flanders Feild”, written by Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae after attending the funeral of a comrade killed in the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Since then, red poppies have been sold to benefit veterans organizations on Memorial Day, called Remembrance Day in the UK and in Commonwealth countries. It is a fitting way to remember the COVID dead.
One cannot ignore the magnitude of the pandemic. Here is the poem that inspired the use of poppies on Remembrance Day and perhaps indirectly influenced Maknojia, as well.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
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