Views of the porch: Art project gives Lexington perspective in a time of social distancing

Experiencing the first stirrings of cabin fever in their homes last weekend in compliance with the guidelines of the coronavirus era, Lexington artists Kremena Todorova and Kurt Gohde did what they always do: come up with an art project.

“It came in the course of our feeling really isolated because of social distancing,” Todorova says in an interview on the porch of a building at Transylvania University, where she and Gohde are longtime colleagues on the faculty. “We felt at a loss about what to do when we aren’t teaching. But we decided that since we’re photographers, we might as well document what’s going on.”

The artists, who have worked for more than a decade as an art collective called Kurt and Kremena, decided to begin making portraits of Lexingtonians in front their homes — always from an appropriate physical distance — and posting the as-yet-untitled results on their Facebook pages.

“We thought about it over the weekend, which is when people were told they had to start practicing social distancing,” says Todorova, a native of Bulgaria who has taught at Transy for 15 years. “Restaurants were out, schools were out, and pretty much life as we know it, for the time being, was gone. So we decided to start on Monday, the start of the first week of this new life.”

Unlike some of their previous projects — such as “Discarded” (2010), during which they spent a year roaming the country photographing castoff sofas — Kurt and Kremena took a more targeted approach, using their Facebook pages to identify people who wanted to participate in the project (or were nominated to do so by their neighbors).

“We knew that now is not the right time to be roaming or knocking on people’s doors that aren’t expecting it,” Gohde says. “We decided to go with Facebook, which we’ve used successfully used before as a way to grow projects — the word we’ve always used is virally, which now seems an unfortunate word — to find communities we don’t know. Now we’ve got a really long list of people who are interested. They can prepare themselves any way they want to. Maybe they want to be in the pajamas they’ve been wearing all day, or maybe they want to be dressed differently.”

The pair’s goal is for the project to include people from different neighborhoods, races, ethnicities and economic circumstances. “We want to touch as many places in Lexington — not physically touch, obviously — as we can, and to represent as broadly and completely the demographics of the city,” Gohde says. “Anybody who looks at the series on Facebook will never have a need to say, Well, they’re never photographing in my kind of neighborhood.”

The artists both take photographs at each home, and don’t reveal which of them shot the picture selected for the series. There’s a friendly competition between them on that score. “One of us is winning, but we will not tell you which one,” Todorova says. “The pictures are ours, not mine or his.”

Ultimately, she says, the goal is to create a document of the coronavirus era in Lexington in real time, partly as a form of reassurance that despite the frightening news, the people of this city are soldiering on.

“Part of the purpose of this project is to connect people, though not physically, to give a sense of others in the city still going on about their lives as well as they can, given that they’re confined to their homes,” Todorova says. “Another purpose is to document this point in time, because it is such an extraordinary moment.”

At each session, the artists record not just their subjects’ images but also the address, the date, the time, and even the temperature. Kurt and Kremena are also conducting brief interviews with their subjects, asking them what’s on their minds that day.

“People do put on their best faces in some ways, but there are times when those faces get a little bleak,” Gohde says. “After one session, three of the four people went back inside and we talked to the father. His wife is a schoolteacher, so her mind was on how to do her job and continue to teach her students. Their daughter just came home from college and moved in with them. Their son, his mind was on video games. But the father said, All I can think about is how to feed everyone.”

Eventually, the artists hope, the series will be shown in a gallery setting as a formal exhibition. They plan to invite all the people and families in the portraits to see it together, as Gohde puts it, “where we’re all back out and about again.”