Covid Zoomin

Covid Zoomin, made during the first year of the pandemic, takes the by-then-familiar grid of the Zoom video call as its compositional armature. The tiled rectangles of remote faces—each a window onto a private interior—translate readily into linocut, where the relief block's discipline of edge and contour aligns with the screen's hard tessellation. Ho's small-format print diary practice was well suited to recording lockdown experience: brief, observational, made on whatever schedule domestic confinement permitted. The piece sits among a body of 2020 work in which she registered the textures of the pandemic year in serial relief prints, alongside Insulate With Cake, Horror Scroll, and Twenty Twenty. The title compresses Zoom (the platform) and zooming in (the act of focus), characteristic of her wry handling of contemporary subject matter and consistent with the diaristic, present-tense register she maintains across her smaller relief works.