Fernando Zelaya:
Final Days!
Fernando Zelaya:
Final Days!
September 18– December 7, 2025
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Fernando Zelaya, Final Days!, archival pigment print, 2024, 11 x 14 inches
Fernando Zelaya, Final Days!, archival pigment print, 2024, 11 x 14 inches
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 18, 2025, 4:30–7:30pm
Final Days!, the first solo exhibition of Bronx-based artist Fernando Zelaya (SJU BFA Photography ’20), focuses on the interplay between photography and writing, presenting a series of black and white photographs interspersed with fragments of text that all together address transience, loss, and formlessness. Zelaya’s images capture fleeting moments such as the glowing light bleeding through window blinds or a faint image of a friend on a sun-drenched beach—each photograph carrying just barely enough information to render the details discernible. His text looks at the limits of language and remains in a constant volley with the photographs, as he states, “I find myself fixated on the spelling of certain words but now realize there isn’t much that separates them and images,” and “I’ve run out of words and have forgotten each of their meanings.”
Zelaya makes pictures that leans towards invisibility—opting for a result that offers less resolution at a time when most images are careening into hyperreality. His work asks: at what point can a photograph recede from legibility, that it functions more akin to text? Can text deny its communicative function to form new modes of representing thought? In Final Days!, image and text exist in a fragile balance—each incomplete on its own, but together forming a meditation on memory, perception, and the space between looking and writing.
Fernando Zelaya is a publisher, photographer, writer, and designer from the Bronx. He is a co-founder of 'cademy, an independent photobook publisher, and he works as a graphic designer at the Dia Art Foundation.