ART-PRESENTATION:Teresita Fernández-Elemental

Based in New York, Teresita Fernández, who was born in 1968 in Miami to Cuban parents, is renowned for her prominent public installations and experiential sculptures. Through her practice, she explores perception and the psychology of looking, regularly manipulating light and space to create immersive, intimate, and evocative experiences. Using a range of materials including silk, graphite, onyx, mirrors, glass, and charcoal, her minimalist yet substantive artworks evoke landscapes, the elements, and various natural wonders, including meteor showers, cloud formations, and the night sky.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pérez Art Museum Miami Archive

The exhibition “Teresita Fernández: Elemental” offers visitors an unparalleled opportunity to experience numerous works by one of the nation’s leading contemporary artists. The exhibition tells the story of a creator who, through her practice, reflects and challenges perceptions of the natural world and the U.S. social order, and asks viewers to contemplate their roles with those spaces. The retrospective introduces visitors to the artist’s large-scale sculptures, installations, and mixed media works that merge formal and conceptual aspects of her practice through the use of natural materials and the historic genre of landscape to reinterpret relationships between nature, history, and identity. The exhibition spans the mid-1990s to the present, offering a comprehensive view of Fernández’s career to date. Featured works include “Untitled” (1997), a mirrored floor sculpture that references voyeurism but encourages self-reflection from those within the structure, and “Fire” (2005), which uses thousands of hand-dyed silk threads to construct flame patterns that become animated by light and air as viewers move around the sculpture.The exhibition also showcases the artist’s most recent body of work, in which she contrasts the sublime nature of traditional landscapes with the current politically charged climate of the United States. Both “Fire (America) 5” (2017) and “Charred Landscape (America)” (2017) underscore Fernández’s reinterpretation of depictions of the land, presenting a contemporary American landscape marred by violence, climate change, and warring ideologies that stands in stark contrast to the idealized vision of the American dream. Embodying contemporary American violence, “Fire (America)” brings to mind some of the most horrifying narratives that have plagued the history of this nation. The title’s two words hint at the dark history of racism. The country’s past will always be tarnished with images of the K.K.K. burning crosses on front lawns in the dead of night. Its present continues to be tormented by instances of hopeless police brutality. The work in “Rise and Fall” expands upon this premise, using raw graphite and pencil to create luminous scenes. The mountainous horizon separating water and sky is a reference to island geography,. The articulation of the landscape in this series appears dipped in a metallic liquid, an effect of the unadulterated graphite used by Fernández that is reminiscent of artist Robert Smithson’s Pour works, whom Fernández has cited as reference. In those works, Smithson used viscous materials like glue or concrete to cascade over a landscape, treating the earth itself as a canvas. Rise and Fall can thus be read within this art historical context as both landscape painting and land art, an amplifying of the term “landscape” that Fernández continues to explore. “Borrowed Landscape” (1998), , consists of a group of five suspended, abstract forms, differing sized volumes of shifting colored light that hover between sculpture, architecture and painting. The drawings are fixed to the floor and their constant shift in scale refers simultaneously to woven floor textiles and to a bird’s eye view of a sculpted landscape. In some areas they are smudged into shadows like the thick pile of a plush woven rug. The entire work is full of such ‘softening’ details. The ‘carpets’ are surrounded by veils of brilliantly-dyed scrim that give the effect of stepping through colored walls to the other side of their painted surfaces and looking through and past them to infinite layers of color beyond. The color appears to almost bleed into the space, the potential crispness of the scrim made diaphanous by the warm light. After selecting an arbitrary route around and between these rectangular spaces, the viewer is treated to the stunning impact of a series of endless vistas of citron, violet, cerulean, and light blue, vistas which are alternately opaque or transparent depending on where the viewer stops in the negative spaces between them. This route is key in that it is this ‘negative’ space between them that further reinforces the sense of walking on a path around a parterre. In this way, the ‘negative’ space between the lushly-hued volumes becomes a ‘positive,’ that is to say, an active space.

Info: Curators: Amada Cruz, Franklin Sirmans, Gilbert Vicario and María Elena Ortiz, Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, Duration: 18/10/19-9/2/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.pamm.org