“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. 1954, San Bernardino, CA. Lives and works in Napa, CA)
Just a Moment
Video, no sound, 4:30 min. Best viewed in full-screen.
On the eve of the Covid-19 lockdown, artist Lewis deSoto was in Phoenix to install a sculpture at the Heard Museum. The lockdown started the day before he returned to California. He made the first two images in this sequence in Phoenix and the rest close to home in Napa. “Since the spread of the virus, I’ve restricted working on big projects that require travel or hotels and I’ve taken pictures with my iPhone that I gathered into a series of twenty-five images called Just a Moment.” The presentation is purposeful. Crossfades symbolize the smear of time in lockdown. Four-and-one-half minutes of silence represent the halt of a normally hectic art life. In the end, Just a Moment is about more than a string of moments. It is about the passage of time—moving forward during a year of confinement. It is about art—the wiliest of jailbreakers—making its own set of keys, swinging open the door, and setting out on the stepping stones of day-by-day toward a new future.