Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA -- SITE Santa Fe presents New York-based artist TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ in an exhibition of new works. The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 7, 2000 with a free public reception from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. and runs through Sunday, January 14, 2001. There will be a gallery talk with Teresita Fernández at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, October 8. The exhibition is organized by SITE Santa Fe and curated by Louis Grachos, the Director & Curator of SITE Santa Fe. An exhibition catalogue specific to her SITE Santa Fe exhibition and published by SITE Santa Fe, will be available late fall 2000.
For SITE Santa Fe, Teresita Fernández has chosen a 5000 square foot space that she will alter and modify for her new works. Fernández writes, "I am currently developing a body of work which deals with the impossibility of wilderness. I am interested in landscape in terms of exotic place, extreme place and objectified space. The concept of wilderness in particular is at the core of these new worksÑthought as a kind of place where one loses one's way, goes astray and becomes literally bewildered. But this very notion of wilderness already implies human presence because in fact, this wandering remains an act of human presence, and the wandering becomes about finding, choosing, marking sites that are most grand, most extreme, most exotic."
The SITE Santa Fe exhibition will consist of an entirely new body of work. It will focus on large-scale sculptural works and wall pieces where, unlike the installations, it is the viewer who surrounds the individual works. Ms. Fernández elaborates, "These works will incorporate abstracted references to natural phenomena, sites in the landscape and states of arrest and movement. For example; references to frozen waterfalls, land formations, and foliage will be used as vehicles for situations that place the viewer as witness to the objectified "site" in nature.
Teresita Fernández was born in Miami in 1968 and holds a M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in New York, Miami, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, Tokyo, and Amsterdam, among others. Ms. Fernández has received fellowships from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and a Cintas Fellowship. She had a residency in 1998 with the American Academy in Rome, Italy. This year, she received a Tiffany Foundation artist grant.