“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. 1978, Montluçon, France. Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Lièvre Et Fruits Sans Titre [Untitled Hare and Fruits]
from the project Le Téléphone Tue Le Cosmos [The Telephone is Killing the Cosmos]
Jean-Baptiste Maitre titles his project after a 1923 quote by German cultural theorist Aby Warburg: “The telephone kills the cosmos.” Conversation technology, Warburg suggests, means men can talk at a distance without the need to walk to one another. And by not walking the world, man does not encounter the natural world and therefore does not create poetic, mythic interpretations of nature.
Maitre made a colorless painting—white acrylic on a white canvas. A modest size: 30 x 40 cm [11.8 x 15.75 inches]. It was, he says, a traditional still life symbolically engaged with issues of life and mortality: dead birds and hares, fruit, a tree branch. Maitre then scanned the white-on white work and used text recognition software “to identify an image in the painting.” This end-point piece is the image produced by the software. It encapsulates mortality, transformation, drift, and mutation in the time of plague.
