Blind Landscape

Teresita Fernández

USF Contemporary Art Museum

Tampa

Aug 17–Oct 10, 2009August 17–October 10, 2009

Installation view of Blind Landscape at University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum

Tampa, FL

The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape, August 17 – October 10, 2009. Teresita Fernández is internationally known for her immersive installations and evocative large-scale sculptures that address space, light, and the perception of change. The exhibition is curated by USF Institute for Research in Art Chief Curator, David Norr and will present a spectrum of the artist's most recent and ambitious projects, including a new sculpture and a room sized installation created specifically for this exhibition. Following its Tampa debut, the exhibition will travel to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, November 1, 2009 – January 2, 2010.

Teresita Fernández, one of the most accomplished artists of her generation, is recognized for her deft ability to transform common materials and processes into dazzling cinematic illusions, blending abstraction, reflection, and transparency into potent configurations of projection and play. Nature and perception are the schematic sources for Fernandez' picturesque materializations. Clouds, trees, water, and fire—in patterned formations of polished stainless steel, glass, plastic, and thread—double as screens, mirrors, and lenses, and vacillate between object and optical phenomena. Much like shadows or ghosts, Fernandez' doubled forms reside in the folds and margins of perception—a tangled overlay of absence and presence, nature and artifice. ''I am interested in the projection of the body, in an imaginary, kinesthetic way, penetrating history and distance cinematically, almost like a daydream,'' she explains. ''It's as if, through visual pleasure, your gaze positions you in a place without actually being there." Indeed, for Fernández, how one sees is as relevant as what one sees.

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