Our new Life@home section begins with a work of art,

Think of the ways our lives have changed since we began social distancing to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Music and theatre lovers can’t go to concerts or plays; dance lovers can’t go to recitals, nor art lovers to museums, foodies to restaurants. That doesn’t mean the richness of our lives diminishes; it just means we need to look at it differently, for now. There are still plenty of new things to experience — alone and together, in person and virtually. And each week the Star brings you that in our Life, Entertainment and Books section — now At Home.

Art is something we can all experience together — even if we’re apart. Each week, we’re presenting Star readers with a work of art.

This week, Carlos Bunga’s new work, at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art, seems to be made for our times — the strong, visual image evokes a sense of us all staying apart while still being together.

But Bunga created this piece even before the COVID-19 social distancing we’re all experiencing. He methodically organized hundreds of standard packing boxes into a vast grid covering a significant portion of MOCA’s second floor.

Bunga’s work encourages us to situate ourselves within art and, thereby, the conditions of the present. The boxes are unlabelled and open-ended, uniformly facing upward, as if offering themselves up to be physically or imaginatively filled. Collectively, the composition suggests an anonymous geography or urban plan, a camp or modular storage system. There are no specific directions, no designated beginning or end. Each viewer’s passage is entirely their own.

We’ll all get through this together, even as we all take our own slightly different path while doing it.

Explore this MOCA artwork and others at moca.ca