“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.
Artist Ben Grosser gives us a gift, a compulsion, a calamity—the ultimate doomscroller, “a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair.” (Doomscrolling of course, is close-to-involuntary engagement with the apocalyptic media cycle.) The artist condenses the continuous cascade of addictively bad news to stark headlines. His point is revelation and, possibly, mindfulness leading to rebellion and change. “By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized messages and interface conventions,” he states, “The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit.”
