“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. 1946, Elizabeth, NJ. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA)
Meeting the Shadow
Shadow is subject in Sandra Klein’s photographs. The images begin as straightforward photos made in her garden or neighborhood—flowers: fresh, fading, or fallen. She then deconstructs them. She erases, excises, leaves only the shadow, the fleeting, the ephemeral. “As I sit in my garden, I watch life become more and more fragmented—the pandemic, politics, issues of race and ethnicity, personal losses, all contribute to an unhinged surrealism. The beauty and decay among the verdure serve as a metaphor for this new world.”
The work is directly connected to this shadowed era. But it looks forward as well. Each image emerges from a slow, meditative process—many hours, sometimes days at the computer. And the results of the journey are unknowable until the artist arrives. Some images work, others fail and are abandoned. Klein has also been reading Carl Jung. The shadow is your unknown, unconscious side. There is danger in rejecting it.
