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Teresita Fernández

MASS MoCA

North Adams

May 24, 2014–Apr 5, 2015

Teresita Fernández Installation

North Adams, Massachusetts

Demonstrating the artist’s remarkable ability to transform materials and their surrounding architecture into an enveloping perceptual experience, Teresita Fernández: As Above So Below combined graphite and gold to create a series of immersive, interconnected installations whose scale shifted from intimate to vast, from miniature to panoramic. Drawing upon natural phenomena and diverse historical and cultural references, As Above So Below opened on May 24, 2014, in MASS MoCA’s main galleries. A reception in honor of the artist took place, in conjunction with MASS MoCA’s fifteenth-year celebration.

Describing a universe in balance, the phrase “as above, so below” originates from the ancient Hermetic tradition central to alchemy, in which every action occurring on one level of reality (physical, emotional, or mental) correlates to every other. Responding to MASS MoCA’s massive and light-filled first-floor galleries, Fernández’s trio of new landscape-informed, large-scale installations embodied this expression, and was united through the show’s elaborately detailed exploration of two essential minerals.

Teresita Fernández Installation
Installation Views: 1 of 4
Teresita Fernández Installation
Installation Views: 1 of 3
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

Learn about the artist