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Teresita Fernández

Commission for Public Art Fund

New York

May 31–Sep 30, 2001

Installation view of Bamboo Cinema at Madison Square Park

Madison Square Park

New York, NY

Marking the revitalization of Madison Square Park, Target Art in the Park--a three-year series of contemporary art exhibitions--kicked off its second summer season in New York with major installations by international artists Teresita Fernández, Navin Rawanchaikul, and Tobias Rehberger.

Teresita Fernández's installation Bamboo Cinema created new views of Madison Square Park by luring visitors into an eight-foot tall plexi-glass "bamboo" labyrinth that perforated the surroundings much like a slow-moving film strip. The vertical walls of the labyrinth were constructed of staggered, transparent plastic poles of differing diameters and heights that were silk-screened with a vertical, striped pattern of intense green and yellow hues. These bamboo-like stalks were embedded in the ground in concentric circles creating a translucent circular maze. The transparent poles allowed different degrees of visibility from every angle. As in the earliest examples of cinematic devices, the vertical lines acted as a continuous shutter, constantly interrupting any movement so that it appeared to flicker.

Installation view of Bamboo Cinema at Madison Square Park
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