Flying Over Brooklyn (Ernie Gehr, 2020) (Patreon)

This short video was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, one of a number of pieces meant to show how New York artists are working, thinking, and faring during the quarantine. Most of the other works have a diaristic bent, but Ernie's piece -- his first new release in several years, I believe -- is an exceedingly simple depiction of separation from the outside.

This process of patient looking, of thinking about the larger world relative to one's small place within it and the heightened vision one experiences behind a camera, is nothing new in Ernie's work. But within this deceptively mundane excerpt of "dead time" -- classically composed as it is -- I sense unease, if not outright paranoia. We see birds and bugs cross in front of the lens, but the big blue expanse belongs to a vague mechanized authority. While we are stuck behind closed doors, power takes to the skies.