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In March of 2020, the world was turned upside-down with the rampant COVID-19 pandemic that seemed to spread like wildfire in a matter of days and weeks. As an instrument of protection against the virus, facial coverings including NIOSH N95 facepieces, quickly became a hot commodity. As factual information about COVID was made hard to ascertain, facial masks were selling out in every drug store as well as online, becoming an immediate necessity to function in the world.
At about the same time, artist Terry Hardy started chronicling the daily masks people were donning in order to deal with the world outside of their house. The mask was the perfect object, as it would come to represent the evolving and disturbing contractions of our times: fear and safety, comfort and division, left and right. Following a co-worker's diagnosis, Hardy himself tested positive for the virus. Though asymptomatic, the horrific stories that were continuously reported about people not coming out of the hospitals alive while refrigerator trucks were lined up outside medical centers as makeshift morgues to deal with the overflow added to his anxiety about the situation.
The Daily COVID-19 Mask Drawings was Hardy's quarantine project that documented the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic where he obsessed daily on an object that became controversial, unobtainable, and sacred. On July 10, 2020, Hardy received an email informing him that he had tested non-detectable for the virus, his sign to stop the drawings. The Daily COVID-19 Mask Drawings is a powerful visual representation of what the world has gone through in the middle of a worldwide medical crisis.
