There's a reason the neighborhood Facebook group page is called "...only in Northside!" And it's because (speaking as a Northsider), there's many things that can only happen in the green-leaning enclave of LGTBQ Rock & Roll liberals and libertarians.
One of those things is a community-wide ScareCorona art show.
This whimsical steampunk-esque take on Medieval plague doctor outfits is a walking exhibit that invited Northsiders to create and display their own ScareCorona scarecrows in their yards or on their porches.
Art show founders Tina Gutierrez and Rene Micheo wrote on the event's Facebook page, "Create your own scarecoronas. A variation on the classic scarecrow. Let's get medieval and scare that virus away. Using materials and clothing from around the house, construct a silly, scary or whatever you are feeling figure. You can even make a chair-coronas."
There are more than 140 on display throughout the neighborhood, all of which you can find on this map. (Even magazine Midwest Living covered the show.)
And some are wild. Including this interpretation by local aerial artist and choreographer Holly Price. She has taken her ScareCorona one step further by making herself part of the piece.
Price currently has two separate performance art works posted to YouTube, set to haunting music by local cellist Kate Wakefield.
Dressed in face-shielding harlequin-style costumes and surrounded by hanging eyeballs and dismembered limbs, Price soaring across the confined space of her porch, restrained by her aerial silks, feels somehow like a metaphor for quarantine — or like the physical manifestation of anxiety.
Price says she was inspired by Gutierrez to take part in the ScareCorona project.
"I had decorated my house like many others for the ScareCorona project and since I am an aerialist, the idea to become a living scarecrow started to take seed," she writes in an email exchange. "We are collectively experiencing a time of great upheaval, anxiety and change as we are all here, peering out into the unknown.
"I was listening to another Northsider, Kate Wakefield’s hauntingly beautiful music, and it spoke to me. Art/dance/movement has always been a way to express my internal landscape and I needed to find ways to process all these emotions. It was a perfect storm to create something new.The first piece is titled 'Spynal' and second 'The Red Garden.'"
"Spynal"
"The Red Garden"
"Everything was done fairly spontaneous and within days of getting the idea, equipment, costume and rushing outside when the light was just right. Looking back, I appreciated the first piece starting with the bones, spine and skeleton awkwardly awaking to this new world. 'The Red Garden' then blooms into a fleshy realness of blood, guts and sorrow. They are helping me express my feelings of morning in this extraordinary metamorphosis our whole world is going through," Price writes.
"I’m so glad I found a way to share my art with friends, neighbors and sometimes strangers walking by," she says.
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