Exploring Uncertainty: An Interactive Art Exhibition (Part One: Personal Uncertainty)

Christopher Miñán Fitzgerald’s luminous portraits of patients in intensive care units reflect the tensions that exist when ambiguity, form, and fate dangle in the face of incomprehensible tragedy. To make sense or extract meaning from near-death experiences, the artist begins with transforming the dehumanizing medical gaze to that of deeply personal portraitures. The process begins with watercolor studies, resulting in fragile and uncontrolled forms that are created when the medium of watercolor pools and bleeds. The second part in the process reimagines the subject in the sturdier material of acrylic or oil paint, regaining control through solidifying the form and structure within the image in large scale.

Fitzgerald invites the viewer to visually contemplate the uncertainties of the self and the body by shifting from a clinical gaze to a compassionate one, exploring the tension of perceived experience against our own mortality. In this way, he confronts the boundary between life and death through the uncertainty of the subject’s fate.