Thursday, March 17, 2011

Good Citizen Gallery: Friday, 22 April 2011

Jose Ferreira: Wandering Thomas
Opening Reception, Friday April 22 - 6-10 pm
April 22 - May 28 2011
Gallery Hours Fri., Sat. Noon - 5pm and by appointment

Wandering Thomas will include a recent body of work in which Jose Ferreira explores the notion of doubt embodied as a state between belief and disbelief. Through a series of photographs and works on paper, he emphasizes a state of reality in which the mind remains suspended between two contradictory propositions, unable to assent to either. Wandering Thomas refers to Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c. 1602), where Thomas's only way of being convinced of Christ's resurrection is by probing his wounds. This concept is extended metaphorically to spaces in the city, which harbor a deep symbolic resonance of being in transition-spaces and states that are constantly in-between.

Doubt brings into question the notion of "reality". It is a common form of psychological discord, with the rational part of one's thought involved in weighing evidence, without which belief has no real substance. Søren Kierkegaard has suggested that, for one to truly possess belief, one would also require a questioning of those beliefs. Decisions in politics, ethics, and law, which frequently determine the course of individual life, place great importance on doubt, and often foster elaborate adversarial processes to carefully sort through the evidence.

The photographs in the exhibition present the viewer with tactile, yet evanescent phenomena, which privilege natural elements, confusing our sense of time and space. In these works, ephemeral, unpredictable veils of mist, smoke, and pollution often obscure the metropolis, such that the concrete is displaced by the temporal, the human-made dwarfed by the phenomenal, and the viewer is disarmed by a suddenly unfamiliar space.

The exhibition portrays a series of meanders in which the artist seeks to reconcile a state of transitory identity, and to claim a margin of solace within lived experience.

Good Citizen Gallery
2247 Gravois Ave,
St. Louis MO, 63104-2852
314-348-4587

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