What to do while quarantining in your late great-uncle’s house, together with your grandmother, who has dementia, in Big Timber, Montana, population about a thousand? If you’re Brandon Sward, you dance in quiet careful swoops, because grandma is sleeping downstairs. You also perform a gay fantasy puppet show using whatever’s at hand, like a wallet-size portrait from boyhood and one of those handsome Burt’s Bees hand salve lids. For a little fresh air, you go to the local park to play with the one friend you can hang with in person, a brown baseball cap decorated with a horse. In each of these instances, you reveal something about the place you’re in, the people who live there, and yourself. You do this in different ways, by telling stories, drawing maps, stating the facts, and walking around while real things are and aren’t happening. And, of course, you videotape and title it all, distributing these musings via vimeo and your own website, because that’s what you’ve got to do these days, to continue thinking, making and feeling, all the while keeping yourself and others safe.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-22 3:04 PM