Covid Collages & Tankas

Using only items which were in his Oakland apartment prior to the lockdown, and material which came from the mail or the internet, Youngdahl produced collages each day upon awakening or after completing his daily legal work. He assembled sixty-six of the collages produced in the middle of the year into a three volume set, titled Prequel, August, Sequel. For each collage he wrote a tanka, a poem whose form is similar to haiku. The pairings of collages and tankas are both personal and political. The quarantine’s boredom and bizarreness, pandemic cultural events, political and social uprisings, hypocrisy of elites, and the birth of a grandchild: all of these subjects make their way into Youngdahl’s colorful and accessible images and words.