Taking its title from Threni; Igor Stravinsky’s musical setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the exhibition approaches lament not simply as an expression of grief, but as a condition through which absence, spiritual erosion and the persistence of the sacred can be examined.

Across painting, sculpture and installation, O’Shea constructs a landscape of fragments, remnants and displaced devotional forms. Concrete, wax, resin, ash, metal, linen and religious paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coexist throughout the former Convent of the Capuchinas, generating a dialogue between the historical architecture of the building and contemporary forms of material and spiritual ruin.

Rather than treating religious imagery through iconoclasm or direct critique, THRENI considers what happens to sacred objects and symbols once the systems of belief that sustained them begin to weaken. Images survive beyond their original functions; crosses become collections, repetitions or archaeological traces; bodies appear fragmented or restrained; and devotional objects remain present even as their meanings become unstable.

Among the works presented is CELIA (2026), an installation composed of more than sixty crosses cast in polyester resin and incorporating ash, minerals, remnants and pigments. The forms derive from a personal collection of crosses belonging to O’Shea’s grandmother and are installed on metal plates attached to the original eighteenth-century wooden beams of the former convent. Through their accumulation and transformation, objects associated with private devotion become suspended somewhere between relic, archive and material residue.

Elsewhere, historical religious paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are incorporated into contemporary installations and sequences, establishing a tension between preservation and disappearance. Sculptural works made from concrete, earth, wire and metal extend this vocabulary into the architectural space, while paintings introduce ambiguous bodies and environments in which something appears familiar yet fundamentally unresolved.

Throughout THRENI, ruin is understood not as an endpoint but as a state of persistence. The sacred has not entirely disappeared; it continues to inhabit matter, images and gestures after certainty has been lost. The exhibition asks what remains when faith ceases to function as a collective structure, and why its forms continue to exert an emotional and aesthetic force even within an increasingly technological and secular world.

Continuing a sequence of musically derived exhibition titles initiated with PRELUDIO and OBERTURA, THRENI extends O’Shea’s investigation into the relationship between images, belief, memory and materiality. Like a lament, the exhibition does not attempt to restore what has been lost. Instead, it dwells within its remains.

THRENI is open to the public from June 5 through August 23, 2026, at the Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro, housed in the former Convent of the Capuchinas in the historic center of Querétaro, Mexico.