“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. 1975, Chicago, IL. Lives and works in Berkeley, CA.)
My Mother’s Titanium Hip
Video, sound, 6:36 min. Best viewed in full-screen.
Jill Miller examines her mother’s unexpected death during the pandemic through the lens of “everyday” quarantine life. Even mourning and absence are digitally mediated. Temporalities shift between virtual and real, past and present, dreamy and distressing. The landscape is unstable and fantastical: error messages interrupt video transmissions, her mother’s titanium hip hovers in the background, and the coronavirus makes an appearance during a conference call.
The frenetic collage entangles and layers video conferencing fragments, 3D models, a chat with a psychic medium, and computer-generated imagery to explore the splintering of time and space during prolonged isolation. She collages the online landscape of our new digital normal, exploring an ontological shift marked by fractured connectedness, anxieties about loss and grief, a dithering between life on- and off-line, and virtually conversing with strangers and friends.