Chuck Ramirez's Quarantine revisits the Dutch vanitas, emphasizing its subtexts of sickness hope, death, and the confluence of personal and social experiences. The series was created in 2000 and referenced isolating measures for the containment of infection. The work also spoke to the HIV pandemic still very much present at that time. Combining the lexicon of Minimalism with the use of the grid and seriality, works such as Quarantine address key issues of contemporary experience.

In words of the late curator Victor  Zamudio-Taylor, "Revisiting the Dutch vanitas genre, Ramirez arranges a series of images of floral displays in a grid. These large-scale digital prints of hospital floral arrangements reference the pain and grief of loss associated with a terminal illness. Also recalling the works of Bernd and Hilla Becher, the depicted typology is objectified, purged of context by editing out narrative cues and background settings. Depleted and stark, the flowers convey, through seriality and metaphor, aspects of human experience as lived history. In contrast to artistic traditions in which everyday image is simply drawn from mass culture (from Warhol to Koons), Ramirez charges the simple, humble, and banal with vital layers of signification." Políticas de la diferencia: Arte Iberoamericano fin de Siglo, Consortium of Museums of the Valencian Community, 2001.