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Teresita Fernández

SITE Santa Fe

New Mexico

Oct 7, 2000–Jan 14, 2001

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at SITE Santa Fe

New Mexico

SITE Santa Fe presents New York-based artist TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ in an exhibition of new works. The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 7, 2000 with a free public reception from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. and runs through Sunday, January 14, 2001. The exhibition is organized by SITE Santa Fe and curated by Louis Grachos, the Director & Curator of SITE Santa Fe. An exhibition catalogue specific to her SITE Santa Fe exhibition and published by SITE Santa Fe, will be available late fall 2000.

For SITE Santa Fe, Teresita Fernández has chosen a 5000 square foot space that she will alter and modify for her new works. Fernández writes, "I am currently developing a body of work which deals with the impossibility of wilderness. I am interested in landscape in terms of exotic place, extreme place and objectified space. The concept of wilderness in particular is at the core of these new worksÑthought as a kind of place where one loses one's way, goes astray and becomes literally bewildered. But this very notion of wilderness already implies human presence because in fact, this wandering remains an act of human presence, and the wandering becomes about finding, choosing, marking sites that are most grand, most extreme, most exotic."

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at SITE Santa Fe
Installation Views
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About the Artist

Portrait of Teresita Fernández

Teresita Fernández's work is characterized by an expansive rethinking of what constitutes landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic, from national borders to the more elusive psychic landscapes we carry within. Fernández unravels the intimacies between matter, human beings, and locations. Her luminous, sculptural works poetically challenge ideas about land and landscape by amplifying the powerful, emotional connection in how we imagine place, and, by extension, one another. Fernández exposes the complex narratives that stem from distorted, colonial histories, elaborating on these themes in subtle ways that insist on intertwining beauty, the socio-political, the intimate, and the immense. Imagining the landscape with reciprocal sentience, Fernández has said “You look at the landscape, but the landscape also looks back at you."

Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Creative Capital Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award; an American Academy of Rome Fellowship (AFAAR); and a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant in Visual Arts, among others. Her works have been exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally including: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Menil Collection; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; SITE Santa Fe; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art; MASS MoCA; and Castello di Rivoli, Italy, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York