20

Cody VanWinkle

Did you have previous associations with this number before making this work?

You know, not exactly. My first thought was that in Roman numerals it's XX, and that means some things. But after ruminating on the number 20 for a little while, other meanings came to mind.

What inspired you to make this piece?

I remembered that 20 is CB slang for your location. That's what truckers and probably military folks call it. As in, "Gold Eagle, this is Morning Breath. What's your twenty? Over."

Well, this year that's been kind of a touchy subject, what your location is. Where are you? Where am I? Where is anyone? So many of us are stuck at home. Personally, I rarely leave the house because my job is easy to do online. Even people who have to travel to their workplace don't really go anywhere else. We're always just in the same old places. And on a broader scale, we're also mostly stuck in the same place we were in our lives at the beginning of the year. Career plans were put off, college may have been postponed, vacations were canceled. "Where are you?" has become a pretty stupid question with a kind of depressing answer.

I wanted to illustrate that monotony, to show what always being in the same place actually looks like. I combed my phone for selfies I took at home since the pandemic began. It turned out to be about 60 pictures. I don't know if that's high or low or normal, but it's what I got. "Here's me at home in the kitchen. Here's me at home with a hat on. Here's me at home in the summer. Here's me at home with a mustache. Here's me at home looking tired, silly, sad, dramatic, cozy..." I arranged them in groups and arranged the groups in groups, so now it's a billion selfies, all taken in my small, stupid apartment since March.

Aside from a response to this number, what does the work say to you now that you've made it?

I feel kind of taken aback by the enormity of it! It could easily have been made into a photomosaic, but I don't know what the big picture would be. Oh jeez, that's quite a metaphor, isn't it? Anyway, I guess the finished work shows me that if you take a step back, the day-to-day can be pretty mundane, provided you're lucky enough to not have any tragedies. And I guess you can see patterns and learn some things about yourself if you're open to it.

Cody VanWinkle spent five years illustrating children's books at the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute. In 2017, he was published in And Lester Swam On, written by 21 rambunctious second graders. Someday, he would like to combine his passions for making ice cream and knitting.