As the pandemic continues to devastate countries around the world, natural disasters bear down and Election Day draws nearer, I find myself struggling with opposite impulses: I want to keep up with the news, and I want to escape into pleasure and imagination. Instagram offers both. Some accounts help me process current events, others provide aesthetic wonder, and still others manage the two at once. This list covers all the points on that spectrum. Consider it a creative coping mechanism for staying engaged during a trying time.
Piotr Szyhalski/Labor Camp
@laborcamp
Many artists who started projects while on lockdown in March have stopped posting about them on Instagram, but Piotr Szyhalski is still going strong with his “Daily Covid-19 “Labor Camp Reports.” (“Labor Camp” is the framework within which Mr. Szyhalski has made art since 1998.) The series consists of black-and-white drawings that use the style and language of propaganda posters to capture the pain and absurdity of the pandemic, with heavy doses of sarcasm and rage at the federal government’s response. Some are direct, like one with a hand pointed at the viewer that implores “You! (Do Something)”; others are more abstract, like a sparse drawing of silhouetted birds above the words “Limitless Melancholy.” Either way, the works are meticulous but piercing, like a carefully released primal scream.
Patience Zalanga
@patiencezalanga
The work of Patience Zalanga, a freelance photojournalist who often covers the Movement for Black Lives, has a gripping, quiet intensity. She tends to forgo the drama of big action for the intimacy of portraits and smaller moments. For instance, a photo of young men inside a ransacked Office Depot seems to hit pause on the scene, as a hooded figure stops to check his phone; through that mundane gesture, Ms. Zalanga creates a feeling of familiarity, even tenderness. There’s also a welcome honesty to her captions, which include a mix of information about the images, personal comments and thoughts on the ethics of documentary photography. Ms. Zalanga, whose work has been featured in The Guardian, Minnesota Public Radio and Time, among other places, and who got her start in Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown, doesn’t pretend to be an all-knowing, objective observer, but lets her followers in on her process and works in community.
Jamie Lee Curtis Taete
@jamieleecurtistaete
If Ms. Zalanga’s images speak to an experience of being Black in the United States, Jamie Lee Curtis Taete’s showcase a culture of whiteness. The Los Angeles–based photographer has an eye for distinctly American forms of consumerism and, and over the past few months he’s brought it to bear on events like pro-Trump rallies and coronavirus lockdown protests. Many of his pictures carry a tension between the ironic distance of the viewer and the subjects’ earnestness, encapsulated by a proudly carried sign or boldly emblazoned T-shirt. In one of my favorites, a yelling blond woman holds an American flag and a poster reading “Give me liberty or give me death,” while standing outside a Baskin Robbins. The intensity of her crusade of victimhood is palpable. As with so many of Mr. Taete’s photographs, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin
@fff00slut
Part of what I love about the artist Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin’s account is that when I come upon her posts, I don’t necessarily know what I’m looking at. Maybe it’s an almost abstract image of bubbles, or maybe a pair of hands holding dirt, but I’m still wondering: Why this dirt? What’s she doing with it? Such murkiness is appropriate, since Ms. Shin is interested in processes we can’t see, like brewing, fermentation and the cultivation of mold, and how they reflect the complexities of society. It’s a delight to come across one of her photographs and be awed by the extent of the natural, and largely invisible, world. Her captions offer limited explanations — the dirt contained hyphae nuggets, which she brought home to feed — but just as quickly generate new questions, like what are hyphae? (The answer: parts of fungi.)
The Flag Art Foundation
@flagartfoundation
What does an exhibition look like when it doesn’t comprise objects in a gallery? The pandemic has prompted a variety of answers to this question, from bland online viewing rooms to printable PDF shows. The Flag Art Foundation’s inventive response has been to post “impossible exhibitions” on Instagram. Each one takes the form of a slide show, with a title, curatorial statement and checklist. What makes them “impossible” is that they can include anything available in image form, even if it no longer exists or is physically inaccessible. Eliminating the logistical aspect of curating has freed up people’s imaginations in intriguing ways. The miniature shows are cross-cultural, richly associative and sometimes deeply evocative. The curator Amy Smith-Stewart’s “In this short Life,” for example, is titled after an Emily Dickinson poem and in just nine slides evokes a spiritual sense of the fleetingness of life.
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October 01, 2020 at 08:00PM
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5 Art Accounts to Follow on Instagram Now - The New York Times
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