TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ
2019-12-23Merging the conceptual and the material within her Dark Earth series, Fernández sculpts raw charcoal into sumptuously textured, abstracted images that challenge conventional notions of landscape art traditions. These panoramic landscape scenes expand and contract to suggest ancient mountain ranges, bodies of flowing water, subterranean minerals, radiant skies, and the immensity of the cosmos. Fernández’s sense of the landscape suggests not only the physicality of the land, but also the history of human beings who have carefully cultivated it, or abused it, and the subsequent erasure that continues to shape our present-day perceptions of the people and places around us. Elaborating on ideas of the traditional “figure in the landscape,” Fernández uses
the reflective quality of the golden metal to prompt viewers to consider their own role in this system, as their gaze is returned and distorted within this constructed landscape, and to reexamine their place in the eroded physical and psychological spaces produced by centuries of dominant colonialism.
Opposite – Dark Earth (Glory), 2019
Exhibition runs through to January 4th, 2020
Lehmann Maupin
501 W 24th Street
NY 10011
New York
