A virtual exhibition featuring artist Eugen-Florin Zamfirescu.

In this Virtual Exhibition at the St. Marys Station Gallery, Eugen-Florin Zamfirescu chose the medium of photography to explore ideas about matter and time. He first studied photography and cinematography in Romania, and his oeuvre includes professional film direction and editing, photographic portraits and essays. His curiosity began even earlier as a child, however, when he built his first camera out of a shoe box.

For Zamfirescu, photography is a means of expression that beautifully balances artistic, scientific, and philosophical ideas and techniques that we, as a civilization, need to understand right now at this moment in history when we are facing unprecedented existential questions. It uses that most basic element: light. We often talk about a photograph “capturing” or “freezing” a moment in time, of making time stand still, an illusion that the law of entropy frustrates. It is part of what drives this Renaissance man–as artist, scientist, and philosopher–to better understand the nature of time and the human attempt to transcend it: the age-old search for immortality.

If art has long claimed to bestow immortality unavailable to our biological selves, scientific discoveries of the last one hundred years and scientists’ forays into the mysteries of the universe have allowed humans to at least dream more vividly of an immortality not posited as on the other side of death but rather as on a continuum with life what he calls, in a beautiful phrase, “the afflictions of time.” In this age of hyper-specialization with artists and scientists and philosophers mostly talking only to their own kind and rarely to the masses of uninitiated, Zamfirescu seeks as an artist to “open the door to the heart” of the onlooker.