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Teresita Fernández

Institute of Contemporary Art

Philadelphia

Mar 20–Apr 25, 1999

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at ICA

Institute of Contemporary Art

Philadelphia, PA

This young, Miami-based artist used her residence at San Antonio's ArtPace to produce a new body of work for ICA.

Combining pre-made elements with site-specific manipulations, Fernández addressed issue of architecture and ornamentation and their powerful emotive effects.Best known for a series of room installations that use mirrors and windows to evoke swimming pools, Fernández deconstructs mundane environments by stripping them of their details to the point of mere suggestion. Her work is defined by viewers' subjective experiences and triggers memories of familiar places as architectural referents. The work's poetic open-ended quality, however, contrasts to the utilitarian frankness of the everyday sites to which it alludes. Fernández explores how space engages viewers and its effects on how people encounter one another. Her installations engender multiple interpretations and resonate within the history of minimal art, as well as within discourses on power relations.

Installation view of Teresita Fernández at ICA
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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