The artist Cecelia and Jose Fernandes at New Orleans Art Center's Politico Pop Up, 2015.
C+J is a collaboration of married couple Cecelia, a 6th generation New Orleanian, and long term New Orleans resident Jose Fernandes, who work out of their studio and home in the 7th ward.
In the C+J diptychs, a forced dispute occurs. Space and meaning are sharply sliced creating a supra-narrative of negotiating constructs challenging the linearity of dominating beliefs.
Structural forces, as designs of power and “progress,” abstracted in the harsh lines of architecture and of a new urban landscape, together with the burden of history, clashing in quiet violence, advancing with the tidal determination of a legally sanctioned hurricane, imposing the parameters of a new stage, encroaching on the neighborhoods, obliterating entire communities, now unapologetically brood over a people who, in desperation, play out gestures which are the only affirmation they have and which are the residual vestiges of a culture that is progressively pushed to the fringes of society.