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Teresita Fernández

Blanton Museum of Art

Austin

Nov 1, 2009–Jan 3, 2010

Installation view of Blind Landscape at Blanton Museum of Art

Austin, TX

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to present Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape, a survey of new and recent works by this internationally acclaimed artist. The exhibition is organized by and premiered at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) and was curated by David Louis Norr, chief curator, USF Institute for Research in Art, in close collaboration with the artist. Accompanying Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape, Drawn Toward Light is an exhibition featuring works from the Blanton's collections that use light as a medium. Both exhibitions will be on view November 1, 2009 to January 3, 2010.
American artist Teresita Fernández (born in Miami, lives and works in Brooklyn) is widely known for her immersive installations and evocative large-scale sculptures that explore the cultural fabrication of nature. Characterized by her deft ability to transform common materials like steel, graphite and glass into forms and images reminiscent of the natural world, Fernández' works bring idea and experience into poetic tension. Meticulous, subtle, and always surprising, her sculptural scenarios offer viewers unique opportunities for contemplation and discovery.

"Investigating the act of looking is central to Teresita Fernández' work," says Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, the Blanton's curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs. "Her works address our experiences of light and space as they evolve moment-to-moment and respond to sensation, memory, and the process of perception."
The Austin presentation of the exhibition includes five recent large-scale sculptures, a series of six wall works, and a new, monumental drawing made on site. Featured among the large-scale works is Vertigo (sotto en su) from 2007, comprised of layers of precision-cut, highly polished metal woven into a reflective and intricate arboreal pattern suspended high above the viewer, not unlike an immense, cascading tree branch. "The multiple planes of space through which the viewer looks become visible simultaneously, vacillating between object and optical phenomena, continuously disassembling and reassembling," writes curator Norr.

Installation view of Blind Landscape at Blanton Museum of Art
Installation Views
1 of 6:
Installation view of Blind Landscape at Blanton Museum of Art
Installation Views
1 of 6:
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

Blind Landscape | Lehmann Maupin