“There is another world, but it is in this one,” said Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In this exhibition, artists look to the future, imagining how we move forward from the tumultuous events of the past year. [read more]
Art in the Plague Year is an online exhibition organized by UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography and curated by Douglas McCulloh, Nikolay Maslov, and Rita Sobreiro Souther. UCR ARTS’s programs are supported by UCR College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, the City of Riverside, Altura Credit Union, and Anheuser-Busch.
All works in this exhibition are reproduced with permission of the artists/copyright holders. Works (images, video, audio or other content) must not be used or reproduced for any purposes other than fair use without prior consent of the artists.
(b. 1974, San Diego, CA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA)
#2 Void (Wind Sway Intervention)
As the coronavirus spiked in the summer of 2020, Aaron Giesel traveled the American Southwestern haunting remote spots and living out of his car. He sought images that “speak to the uncertainties of this time, through the land.” This photograph was made at The Black Gap, a remote wilderness on the Rio Grande River along the border between Texas and the Mexican State of Coahuila. Giesel stood before the camera, in front of the gap itself, holding black darkroom foil. Time, buffeting wind, and a long exposure turned him into the dark cloud. The artist terms it “a black gap at The Black Gap.” It’s as good a description as any of this moment and of our future.
Giesel cites writer Jack Kerouac as an influence. In Desolation Angels, Kerouac writes about the void, the philosophical concept of nothingness manifested. “…the earth itself’ll disintegrate into atomic dust (as it was in the beginning) and the void still the void won’t care, the void’ll just go on with that maddening little smile of its that I see everywhere, I look at a tree, a rock, a house, a street, I see that little smile…”
