Wandering: Fifty Years of Work by Lewis deSoto is a career-spanning survey of the California artist’s sustained engagement with the natural and built environment. Drawing on his Cahuilla heritage, deSoto has explored landscape in relation to cultural identity, cosmology, and consciousness. Wandering provides the first major assessment of his photographic work, which has underpinned deSoto’s interdisciplinary practice since the late 1970s when he studied at UC Riverside. Presented across two floors of both the California Museum of Photography and the Culver Center of the Arts, the exhibition will debut previously unexhibited photographic series and recontextualize historic works, tracing a trajectory from conceptual photography to immersive installations and sculptural projects.

Born in San Bernardino, deSoto has used photography to witness the industrial impacts on the Inland Empire’s varied landscapes and suburban areas. He revisited these early bodies of work decades years later, bringing a renewed perspective to the region. His key series Empire (2012–2015) and Power (2013–ongoing) on view are large, highly-detailed panoramas seamlessly assembled through hundreds of frames. A timely reflection on environmental transformation, Power depicts power generation plants (active and retired) throughout California. Each image is accompanied by research of the existing Indigenous culture in that location, a pairing that for deSoto, links “back to that powerful belief that all things are imbued with inherent energy.”

Relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1980s, deSoto furthered his lens-based approach to place through groundbreaking time-based media and site-specific installations. The figure of the artist is a recurrent presence throughout the exhibition, from early performance-based experiments for the camera to humorous self-portraiture through oversize, inflatable sculptures.

Wandering: Fifty Years of Work by Lewis deSoto is curated by Tanya Zimbardo, guest curator. Nikolay Maslov, Curator of Special Projects, is coordinating curator. Exhibitions at UCR ARTS are supported by the City of Riverside.

Image: Lewis deSoto, Wave System, 1983, from the series Site Projects. Courtesy of the artist. Copyright Lewis deSoto.