“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.
Ens/centrado Collective [Residentes del Centro Vida Juventud Cristiana A.C.] and Gabriela Elena Suárez
Gabriela Elena Suárez (b. 1986, Mexico City. Lives and works between Mexico City and Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico)
Looking for the Light
These photographs are the collective work of photographer Gabriela Elena Suárez and the young inmates at a youth rehabilitation center in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico. They are pinhole photographs—an interior space made light-tight, a pinhole the only portal to the outer world: a camera obscura, literally a “dark room.” The landscape outside is projected on the walls, floors, people, furniture—inversed and upside down. The projected image is then captured by a digital camera. In the time of Covid-19, these photographers are trapped inside. The world meanwhile, what can be glimpsed of it, is upside down and backwards, literally topsy-turvy. “The virus is not so scary when you know worse things,” states Suárez, “and in those moments all that remains is working to find the light.”
