“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. 1980, Red Springs, NC. Lives and works in North Carolina)
Othered Suns
Sound, 14:34 min.
antoine williams writes: “Othered Suns is an audio collage sound installation that deals with the themes of migration and the body. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley writes in his book Freedom Dreams that “the history of Black people has been the history of movement-real and imagined.” This piece explores the physical, emotional, psychological, and temporal landscapes Black bodies have had to continuously traverse in order to find spaces of freedom. Pulling from afropessimism and monster theory, Black bodies find themselves in a perpetual migration.
The audio collage is a loose narrative of an unending relocation. This piece chronicles the literal movement of bodies arriving on the shores of the US from the transatlantic slave-trade, to the mass exodus of Black people from the Jim Crow south to the north as well as the precarious nature of day- to-day movement through public space. Social movement through economic and educational institutions under the American caste system to searching and finding new worlds through the Black imagination are also explored in Othered Suns.” The piece collages found sound with dialogue from Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (from which the piece derives its title), No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and The Black Fusionist Society Manifesto written by the artist.
