“I made my first collage. I remembered a crazy looking inverted wok that this guy had on his head, and then I cut out tiny different viruses and that was my anti-virus deflector hat."

“I gave that to her because gentle humor can be healing," Bjorkman says. "She laughed about it and so we were able to transfer that from something really heavy to something lighter.”

Bjorkman says that humor is his way of dealing with the horrid effects that COVID-19 has had on the world and his family.

“I have to translate something into humor, that's how I cope,” he says. “That humor came from my father. He, one of my sisters, and I would get together and take off someplace just laughing.”

The COVID Dreams series is made up of figures from the late 1800s to early 1900s, coinciding with the last global pandemic, and Bjorkman says that’s done purposely.

“We are going through a 100-year pandemic,” Bjorkman says. “Consequently, I'm using images from around the time of the previous pandemic. I have a large library of different woodcuts that are from the 1890s.”

The artwork was also shared with his daughter's medical team.

“I made a collage for her and her clinic, that they hung up in her clinic, and at the end of the year they presented it to two of their top students,” Bjorkman says.

Bjorkman has future plans for the collage series, perhaps turning it into a book or animated series.

“I would like to think of something else, you know a video or something, like to have some of the images- their hands go up (and down),” he says. “We have received inquiries from museums, putting together their COVID experiences.”

Bjorkman is just trying to make it through the pandemic like everyone else but hopes his artwork will help bring meaning – and laughter – to these times.

Watch the video above to learn about Bjorkman's evolution from painting, to photography - and how the Covid Dream collage series began when his photography travel plans were interrupted by the virus.