“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, former Yugoslavia. Lives and works in Oakland, CA)
Elemental Forms: Landscapes Rearticulated
Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer’s project uses wide-open observation in service of repairing a fractured relationship between man and nature. The artist begins with daily observational walks in a redwood forest overlooking San Francisco Bay. There, she connects with the landscape and distills her observations into sketches. The drawings, in turn, are transformed into wet plate collodion photograms. In her darkroom, Nikolova-Kratzer’s uses her paper cutouts and varied maneuvers to expose sensitized collodion film. “By arranging the sinuous, organic lines into new compositions, I invite the viewer to form new associations and to envision and claim different possibilities.” The artist does not exclude anthropogenic elements such as wildfires, pollution, cargo ships. “I sense that there is a deeper wisdom in not rejecting, but rather in striving to take in the view with equanimity, in resisting the urge to deny the parts I find sad and distressing; that somehow this may be the path to imagining something that is more true: more sustainable, more beautiful, more kind.”
