During a 2012 trip to the Havana Biennial, Chicago-based curator and artist Cara Megan Lewis met Havana-based artist Alejandro Figueredo Díaz-Perera. The precise details of their meeting and their subsequent romance are not made available to readers of their collaborative photobook S.M.S. / Simultaneous Moments of Silence. And this information is best withheld. The book, which through a selection of cell phone and candid photographs taken seconds apart over the course of a year after their separation (he remained in Cuba, she returned to Chicago), documents their “only means to stay connected across the geographic and political distances that separate (their) homelands…” Ending with their reunion at O’Hare airport it is a lover’s document; but as an artist’s book and a contemporary art project it points outward as it should, connecting to the artistic legacy in which it operates and enacting or complicating relevant themes in art today.

- Jessica Cochran, Former Curator of the Center for Book and Paper Arts