STATEMENT: In Holy Red, Johel Pereira collects images of communal sacred spaces across South Florida, cataloguing their maturing external beauty while preserving the aura that radiates from even the quaintest of these spaces. For this exhibition, meditative black and white images and a collection of found vintage footage occupy the central room of Homebase Studios. Some of the photographs’ subjects serve as apexes of South Florida’s cultural history, while others represent the changing spiritual tides of a strongly mystic region. Floridian subtropical swamp heat, communion with wildlife, traffic-inspired road rage, and the pressures of modern life give ample reason to seek these spaces out. However, people are increasingly turning towards being “spiritual” rather than “religious”, ascribing to a decentralized mix of different practices, usually from their own home. Where does that leave the communal spaces where religion was lived and breathed in unison? And is a church the only place where one can find peace?
The photographs of these institutions speak to ideas of how we define sacred spaces, rituals, and interrogate a tangible structure’s capacity to hold an intangible part of humanity. These works are coupled by a dedicated Red Room, where viewers can create their own intimate, meditative experience under ritual directives of respect. In creating a dedicated space for a moment of “prayer,” Holy Red reminds viewers of what it feels like to be in these spaces, along with the tension between inner thoughts and what happens in one’s surroundings. Pereira surveys the relationships between memory and geography, culture and material, and deigns the communal as sacred, inclusive and outside of architecture. Throughout the world, the ages, and several different faiths, the arts were adopted to make a space sacred, communicate its importance, and visualize the meaning of a religion. The argument here is not that these religious buildings form the basis of community, nor that any one church is an exclusive club—there is no argument, really. Rather, Pereira engages in an age-old practice of using art as a tool elaborating on faith.