Artwork by Jennifer Willet, “COVID Suit,” 2020.Artwork by Jennifer Willet, “COVID Suit,” 2020. Photo by Justin Elliott.

National art exhibition features faculty works

Two members of the School of Creative Arts faculty are among the contributors to a virtual exhibition by the Royal Society of Canada in response to the challenges of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Engaging Creativities: Art in the Pandemic is an online exhibition and performance space that features solo artists, artist collaboratives, and academics — including Nadja Pelkey and Jennifer Willet of the University of Windsor.

Pelkey, a photography technician and sessional instructor, is displaying Shared Air, a series of about 70 silver gelatin prints that use a single analog image of the sky between Detroit and Windsor. Haze from the California wildfires result in images that play with containment, reflection, and visibility as analogues to the surrounding political, social, and environmental conditions.

Dr. Willet, director of the Incubator Art Lab, is showing images from her COVID Suit series, which explores shared experiences of fear and isolation under orders to stay at home. It chronicles her daily activities — cooking, caring for children, shopping — while wearing a bedazzled hazmat suit.

Willet also serves on the society’s Working Group on Artistic Responses to COVID-19, which conceived of the exhibition as a way to integrate creative responses to this crisis. Check out Art in the Pandemic.