Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Director Lawrence Rinder writes: "deSoto has explored a wide variety of media in his efforts to express the nuances of various social histories and worldwide cosmologies.
The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art writes that "deSoto's multimedia installations combine sound, light, video, space, and sculpture elements and are site-specific or oriented toward making a complete environment.
"[5] In the 2016 publication EMPIRE, deSoto writes that he began taking photographs of his model cars when he was ten years old; he later graduated to documenting the world around him using Polaroid and Minolta cameras handed down from his father.
DeSoto's installation works have typically made extensive use of manipulated recorded sound, with an emphasis on using directional speakers and projected imagery to create an evocative environment.
She quotes deSoto's assertion that there is no word for sacredness in the Cahuilla language in support of the idea that his work asks questions about the possibility of locating the sacred in the everyday.
Paranirvana was created after deSoto's father died; curator Susan Stoops writes that despite its majestic size, its depiction of the Buddha (and the artist himself) at the moment of death combine with the cyclical deflation and inflation of the sculpture to "underscore a sense of insubstantiality and impermanence.
In 2005's The Restoration, the artist staged a tableau vivant in the style of Johannes Vermeer's dramatic paintings but set in a contemporary garage, complete with a mechanic working on a vintage Pontiac Grand Prix.
In a 2010 profile in the New York Times Auto section, Czap writes that the extensive and often symbolic modifications made to these cars transform them into "vehicles for exploring subjects from the acts of Spanish conquistadors to the empowerment of Native Americans to the military-industrial complex.
[21] In 2016, a collection of photographs and essays by DeSoto titled EMPIRE was published by Heyday Books and the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art in San Bernardino.
[6] This book serves as a comprehensive collection of images from his Inland Empire project, a portion of which was exhibited at the Fullerton Museum from November 2015 to February 2016.
"[6] DeSoto has exhibited widely across the United States as well as in England, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and Sweden;[22] in 1997 he was commissioned to create an installation, Dervish, at Metronom in Barcelona.