“Life is full of small moments of clarity and compassion that we hold onto to get through to the next day,” says New York, New York-based artist Jessica Frances Grégoire Lancaster. “However, social media has redefined our 24-hour march through time into ephemeral communications and gestures.” Lancaster’s series of paintings, “Fifteen Seconds,” immortalizes the fleeting documentation of ordinary beauty made by friends, colleagues, and acquaintances within her online social network. “Based on screenshots saved to my phone in 2018 and 2019, I returned to this collection of images during the lockdown in 2020 to distract myself from the isolation so many of us felt during that time,” she elaborates. “I paint on glass, insinuating the presence of this material in the technologies we use, such as smartphones and tablets — their dimensions mimicking Instagram Story’s 9: 16 proportions, as these digital screens have become the conduit for recording and storing human memory.”

See more from “Fifteen Seconds” below!