“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. 1990, Pittsburgh, PA. Lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA)
Infinite Essence
Infinite Essence is photographer-engineer Mikael Owunna’s response to pervasive media images of Black people dead and dying. The trope of the Black body as a site of death is omnipresent, he states. Being gunned down by police officers, drowning and washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, starving and suffering in award-winning photography.
With Infinite Essence, Owunna transforms the bodies of his Black models into transcendent, ethereal vessels. He hand-paints their bodies with fluorescent colors. He uses a strobe that only transmits ultraviolet light—built using his engineering background and employing a non-visible wavelength. Owunna clicks his shutter in total darkness and, for a fraction of a second, his models’ bodies illuminate as the universe. “Ultraviolet light is not visible to the human eye, and so we can illuminate and find the unseeable therein, the soul, the Igbo spiritual concept of the chi. It is on this plane of existence where, regardless of our experiences of oppression on the physical plane, Black people are infinite.”
