Apparition(Golden)

Apparition (Golden) is an imagined scene that unravels landscape history, place and the fluctuation of power that surrounds natural resources. Using gold and charcoal (which is made from burned trees), the artwork emphasizes the stacked connections between places, people, and materials and reveals the loaded, often omitted connections to colonization and the violence embedded in the landscape. The choice of materials deliberately references the greed that ignited the California gold rush as well as the ongoing devastation caused by wildfires throughout the region.

In Apparition (Golden), Fernández also summons aspects of what has been rendered invisible in the landscape, hiding in plain sight. She imagines the ghostly remains of Lake Lagunita, (just outside the window), which was an irrigation lake built in the 19th century before ongoing droughts dried up its waters.

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