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The dwellings of assorted characters fill the borders of each drawing Andrea Joyce Heimer made for her 2020 exhibition The Quarantine Drawings (People Waiting) at Nino Mier Gallery. Each bursts with the kind of color, pattern, furniture, and plants found in many contemporary city apartments. The products of a daily drawing practice during quarantine at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the artist describes the subjects of these works as “…doing very little. They stand, sit, eat, fuck, stare out the window, and listen. They are waiting.” 

Simone Johnson remembers making her first drawing of a bodega cat when she saw one lying on a freezer accompanied by a sign that said: “Please do not touch the cat.” The vision of this cat— likely sitting amongst shelves stacked with bottles and boxes of products meant to be touched and taken away— would indeed be a memorable moment for anyone (myself included) who adores the furry presence of these working felines. 

During World War II, Georgia--the diminutive country in the Caucuses--was annexed by the Soviet Union, and stayed that way until 1991. The Soviet Union had been in disrepair for over a decade, and so Georgia suffered, too: during this time, Rusudan Khizanishvili was a young film student at the State Academy of the Arts, in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. “We didn’t have heating, gas, electricity, even water,” she told us via Zoom from her studio in Tbilisi, where she still lives. “We used candles for reading and for living.” 

We spoke to the painter Andrea Joyce Heimer in the thick of quarantine--she was out back of her Ferndale, Washington house, in a newly wrought studio, surrounded by paintings that were getting ready to be packed up and shipped to Los Angeles for a show at Nino Mier Gallery, in West Hollywood. Somewhere on the premises, a family of raccoons she’d taken to feeding slumbered.