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Teresita Fernández

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

Cleveland

Jan 28–May 8, 2011

Installation view of Blind Landscape at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

Cleveland, OH

Organized by the University of South Florida Institute for Research in Art; Coordinated at MOCA Cleveland by Margo Ann Crutchfield, Senior Curator
Marjorie Talalay and Peter B. Lewis Galleries.

Teresita Fernández is internationally known for immersive installations and evocative large-scale sculptures that address space, light, and perception. Made with polished stainless steel, glass, and other materials including plastic and graphite, Fernández's abstrat sculptures incorporate reflection, light and shadow in poetic, somtimes luminous formations that suggest natural phenomena. This survey presents a spectrum of the artist's most recent and ambitious projects created between 2005 and 2009. Featured among the exhibition's ten works is the artist's latest graphite and steel sculpture; Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) (2009); and Epic (2009), a monumental graphite wall installation. Resembling an immense, cascading branch, Vertigo (sotto en su) (2007) includes eight layers of precision-cut, highly polished metal woven into an intricate, reflective arboreal pattern that suspends from the ceiling high above the viewer. Fernández's work vacillates between object and optical phenomena, often doubling as screens, mirrors, and lenses, while exploring the relatioship between nature and perception.

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