Works from SARS zones -- about half those included in the project -- often have a different feel. One of the most striking is a photo of a young woman with tan lines from a surgical mask across her face. The outline in skin tones seems to signal a new kind of taboo, as now the face has become a private zone. The connotations are of lost innocence and perhaps even a future of lost identity.
Jardin received the picture in a chain of e-mails she cannot trace back to an original source, but the caption in simplified Chinese characters, "This summer is past" (
If the results are sometimes mixed, it may be because in creating art exhibitions for the blogosphere, Jardin is exploring such new territory. "This is the first time that I'd been involved in a project where we were soliciting the creation of art from the general online public and from digital artists, she said.
Then, by measure of explaining her goals for the new medium, "I went to art school at the San Francisco Art Institute. I come from a family of professional artists. One reason that I became sort of disillusioned or alienated from that world when I was younger is that it felt so separate from the rest of the world. And I wanted to do things with my life that felt more inclusionary."
Though she has not achieved the stature of Defoe's event-defining work, she seems motivated by the same spirit.
The SARS Art Project can be viewed online at http://www.sarsart.org.
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