Articles of Faith, Visible Signs Dangerous Days for Barach de Spinoza. Noosa Regional Gallery Seeking the Centre.
The use of signing in this work indicates my interest in the use of hand gestures historically in religious painting and the text of the work in historical quotation the stock and trade of all artists (in post-modern vernacular you might identify it as appropriation)

Two light boxes, one with a message in international signing language a Holtzerism,." God said it. I believe it. So that's that." The other with a legend to decipher the message.

Following Descartes move to displace god and place 'man' at the center of the universe Barach de Spinoza a 17th philosopher sought to place religious and spiritual belief on a firmer footing in the new age of reason. His efforts to place a love of god as the outcome of a reasoning mind rather than through the prescriptive revelationary dogma of the old testament, gained him no friends, he was excommunicated by the elders of the Amsterdam Jewish Synagogue 1656 and charged with apostasy, atheism and corruption by the Christian churches.

With the rise of various evangelical fundamentalism's and fluffy duck mysticism's in the late 20th and 21st century Spinoza would fare no better today. The attacks on Spinoza and other free thinkers mark the ongoing decline of the idea of a secular state in the Netherlands then and other western countries today. Increasingly the separation of powers between church (religious beliefs) and state are being manipulated and eroded.
"The origin of superstition affords us a clear reason for the fact that it comes to all men naturally, though some refer its rise to a dim notion of god, universal to mankind, and also tends to show, that it is no less inconsistent and variable than other mental hallucinations and emotional impulses, and further it can only be maintained by desire, hatred, anger and deceit, since it springs not from reason, but solely from more powerful phases of emotion." (Tracticus Theologico Politicus)