Curious Matter in Jersey City, NJ & Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn, NY are delighted to present their special collaborative exhibition The Fool’s Journey featuring the work of 36 contemporary artists. The exhibition will be presented in two parts concurrently at Curious Matter and Proteus Gowanus. The exhibition is a complement to the yearlong, multi-disciplinary inquiry hosted by Proteus Gowanus on the theme of Migration and will be exhibited in parallel to its Future Migration show, exploring where we may end up as we embark into the future.

The most courageous part of any undertaking is always the beginning. Making the difficult decision to begin pushes aside the doubts and fears of what may lie ahead and calms the expectation of failure. This energy of beginning is the Fool who sets out into an unknown to discover whatever he may find. In the tarot, the Fool is represented by the numeral 0: nothing, emptiness, void. The fool is a blank slate without knowledge, an acolyte who is seeking. He starts out penniless and ragged, carrying all of his meager possessions with him; a young man, just leaving home to make his way in the world. He is a naïf full of dreams, willing to let the Universe show him the way. The Fool’s journey can belong to the microcosm or the macrocosm. We travel it from moment to moment or over a lifetime. It can occur as an inward or an outward manifestation. In all of its permutations it is the journeying that is most important. It does not matter where we ultimately end, what matters is that we have changed from the experience; that somehow from each small or large event we have come away with a little more wisdom. Hopefully, each work in this exhibition will move you a little further along your personal path.

THE ARTISTS–CURIOUS MATTER • Lasse Antonsen • Arthur Bruso • Elaine Su-Hui Chew • Travis Childers • Clair Chinnery • Brian Edgerton • Peter H. Everett • Mustafa Faruki • Laura F. Gibellini • Tom Hollenback • Cat Jensen • Matthew Jensen • Charles Printz Kopelson • Ross Bennett Lewis • Marianne McCarthy • Raymond E. Mingst • Alex Nathanson • Gilda Pervin • Ari Richter • Dave Rittinger • Roger Sayre • Garric Simonsen • Claire Watson • Ellen Wiener • Sasha Zhitneva • PROTEUS GOWANUS • Fanny Allié • Lasse Antonsen • Louise Barry • Angela S. Beallor • Joseph Cavalieri • Gail Goldsmith • Ian Addison Hall • Joe Lugara • Marianne McCarthy • Anatoli Savov Monov • R. Wayne Parsons • Sarah G. Sharp • Melissa A. Stern • Claire Watson • Katarina Wong