“Relay-Delay Banner Series” is an interdisciplinary work consisting of performative video accessed by a QR code, held alongside photographic banners and installation. IGUANA Collaborative: Erskine + Stein (Sherry Erskine, John K Erskine, and Bonnie Sue Stein) aimed to engage the public in safely viewing photography and video during late quarantine in May 2021. Each banner image had a unique QR code to a corresponding short video on YouTube for the audience to “bring the photo to life.” Bonnie Sue Stein was on site to guide viewers to scan the banners.

The “Relay-Delay” series of videos, photographs, and banners examines concepts of isolation and normalcy during the pandemic. The video series began in January 2021 across 800 miles from Holland, Michigan to the Hudson Valley, New York and spanned all four seasons. The artists used a penpal structure to investigate the restorative properties of walking in nature during quarantine. Contemplating human interconnectedness, Erskine and Stein corresponded with short performative video postcards, layered digital images, minimal soundtracks and titles that related to ecological and political issues. Wrapped in fabric, our body forms become a canvas for musing during a dark winter, hopeful spring, fleeting summer, and cathartic fall. Fabric enhances the hypnagogic (dream-like) quality of the “body forms” in our images: isolating, concealing, restricting, or defining movements and tensions within the human figure to suggest an archetypal figure beyond age, race and gender. By blurring the indexical quality of representational portraiture, larger psychological or metaphysical themes emerge regarding the concept of normalcy. The videos uncover emotions ranging from feelings of oneness with each other, the earth and its life forces to the anxiety and sorrow one feels when witnessing environmental destruction.