Profs Stephanie Syjuco and Jill Miller in "Art in the Plague Year" Exhibition

Stephanie Syjuco, Jason Lazarus, and Siebren Versteeg, "PublicPublicAddress: A Nationwide Virtual Protest," 2020-ongoing. Collaborative video.

Art in the Plague Year: https://www.artintheplagueyear.com

Professors Stephanie Syjuco and Jill Miller are featured in an exhibition at "Art in the Plague Year" at UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography. The show seeks to present art with a lens toward the future, asking artists to imagine how the world may be molded by the tumultuous events over the past year. The name of the exhibition draws from Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year." The book, published in 1722, recounts one man’s experience of the last epidemic of bubonic plague that sweep through London in 1665 and later became known as the Great Plague of London.

Professor Syjuco's collaborative project, "PublicPublic Address: A Nationwide Protest," poses a question and provides an answer. “What if those who cannot protest on the streets could join those who could?” The site is a “virtual protest” in support of Black Lives Matter. Anyone can participate. “Send us a short video/image of you protesting,” state the artist organizers, “and we will digitally ‘cut it out’ and stitch it into a moving collage of hundreds of other submissions.” Visit the website for more info: http://www.publicpublicaddress.com

Professor Miller's video collage entangles and layers video conferencing fragments, 3D models, a chat with a psychic medium, and computer-generated imagery to explore the splintering of time and space during prolonged isolation. She collages the online landscape of our new digital normal, exploring an ontological shift marked by fractured connectedness, anxieties about loss and grief, a dithering between life on- and off-line, and virtually conversing with strangers and friends.