There are times when a significant event interrupts our lives, making us feel like we have been put on hold by forces beyond our control, shaking our perceptions of day-to-day reality. Such a destabilizing interruption is foremost in our collective consciousness at this moment, having all experienced this on a grand scale when the world came grinding to a halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, suspending us in uncertainty.

As disruptive and distressing as such episodes can be, they can guide us forward with new perspectives and changed priorities. Reflecting on what is most important to us, we may contemplate new ways of being and reconsider, or even re-invent, essential aspects of our existence—be it our jobs, our relationships, our living environment, our well-being and even our greater purpose in the world.

Moving Images: pause…. restart features moving image artworks by 23 artists that address the idea of restarting with renewed purpose, offering their reflections on creating a better world, no matter what changes, big or small, they envision to get there.

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Once in the album, click on the first slide to be lead through the gallery

About the Juror

Clark Buckner is a curator and cultural critic, who works as Director of the San Francisco art gallery and production company, Telematic Media Arts, where he exhibits and supports time-based arts with particular attention to screen culture and art's intersection with contemporary information and telecommunications technologies.

For many years, Buckner taught critical theory and cultural criticism in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. His publications on art, philosophy, and film/video have appeared in both academic and popular journals. He previously served as Director/Curator of the project space, MISSION 17, and he composes sound scores for the dance company Jennifer Perfilio Movement Works. He has a PhD in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University.

Juror's statement

The title of this exhibition, Moving Images: pause…restart, immediately evokes our recent collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of the virus, across the country and the world, brought daily life abruptly to a halt, interrupting work and school, and rendering typical social interactions impossible. Life as we knew it was put on pause. And it only began to "re-start" last Spring, when the vaccines were first developed and disseminated. Yet, re-covering from the pandemic has proven more complicated than anticipated. Public health has been horribly politicized, disinformation has been widely propagated on social media, and vaccines have not been equally distributed around the world. So that, at home and abroad, the virus continues to spread and mutate; and, rather than emerging from our quarantine as we had hoped, we find ourselves in a liminal state: we are better guarded against the virus, but it is very much still with us.

In this same vein, the videos featured in this exhibition present the dynamics of movement, interruption, and renewal as less of a series of discrete moments in a narrative sequence, than a play of forces that off-set one another in complex and, sometimes, contradictory ways. And they find this play of forces at work, in far reaching facets of experience: including, but not limited to, the play of light and color, the passage of time, the political limbo of undocumented immigrants, the fluid underdetermination of gender and identity, the power of symbols, the fragility in our constitutions, and the contradictions in our institutions. Collectively, the result is a portrait of precarity and resilience, rich with patience, appreciation, hope, and joy. (Read the full-length statement)