C+J (Cecelia & Jose Fernandes)

Cecelia Fernandes is a 7th generation New Orleanian whose perspective reflects her experience growing up in the black community. She studied painting, sculpture and videography, and lived five years between Lisbon and Rome, completing her education at New York’s New School for Social Science.

Jose Fernandes, a long time resident of New Orleans, was born in Angola, Africa, of Portuguese parents and raised in Lisbon. In 1992, early in his career, he won an Alpha Award for fashion photography. Disenchanted with fashion, he took an eight year hiatus and sold furniture door to door to rural black communities. In 2005 he documented his and his wife Cecelia’s walk through 6th and 9th ward the day after Katrina, and has been shooting documentary ever since.

C+J’s diptychs explore parallels and contradictions in a dialog focused on social, political, racial and economic mechanisms and their intersection with people and culture. Here, the ambiguous line of joinery deconstructs architecture as the fixed order that governs space, violently pressing against the chaotic, autogenic nature of marginalized communities, creating a visual representation of regeneration of space, the dialectic of creation and un-creation.