Rebecca Solnit on Ana Teresa Fernandezs Art and Work

Interview: Ana Teresa Fernandez, "Foreign Bodies" at Gallery Wendi Norris

Interview: Ana Teresa Fernández, "Foreign Bodies" at Gallery Wendi Norris

past MONIQUE DELAUNAY, EDITOR on 04/03/2014

Artist Ana Teresa Fernández is in in Sao Paulo, Brazil when San Francisco Art Enthusiast talks with her about her upcoming solo exhibition, Foreign Bodies at Gallery Wendi Norris in April. Invited past Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), the leading individual art university in Brazil, and a performance group called Coletivo Pi, Fernández is creating independent work at FAAP in an international creative person residency program and collaborating with Coletivo Pi to create iii live performances in Sao Paulo, Campinas, and Rio de Janeiro titled "Entre Saltos."

Residences are critical to Fernández'southward multimedia practice that explores the politics of Intersectionality, psychological and concrete barriers that ascertain gender, race, and grade, and how that shapes personal identity, culture, and social rhetoric. Her residences have all been in politically- or socially-charged locations in the earth like Greatcoat Town, South Africa and Jakmel, Haiti. "Residencies are quite pivotal in my exercise because information technology physically takes you out from your comfort zone and plops yous in the unknown, in a situation that provides you with such a different perspective," Fernández says. "All these cities are so complex and loaded with history and social challenges through race and disparity. When I'm in them it is like you lot are learning to swim all over again, learning to speak a new linguistic communication, a new social exchange and practice. Here is where you accept to get socially liquid to be able to have that osmosis with the customs. To let people accept you lot and have a meaningful exchange. That you are not there to give nor take just merely exist together and create together for a bit. And through art one can speak and then much more broadly and cross those social, language or class barriers. I come out bathed with new information, new ways of existing and exchanging thoughts and practices each fourth dimension I get to a residency…. And this in plow gives me conviction that art has the pregnant and the weight to modify the world even if just a lilliputian bit."

Ana Teresa Fernandez, In Betwixt (operation documentation at San Diego/Tijuana Edge) at Gallery Wendi Norris

Although her piece of work impels her to be a world traveler, Fernández remains constantly inspired and encouraged past San Francisco, the urban center she calls 'home.' She arrived here 10 years ago, recipient of a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute during a portfolio review. "I was studying languages at a community higher and taking i sculpture class. I was told to nourish a portfolio day and showed up with 24 instant Polaroids of my piece of work. I was given a scholarship on the spot. So I actually had no connections to [San Francisco] until I began my studies of fine art at that place when I was 20. Now it is my home, where my imagination is constantly challenged and tickled," she says. The city'southward unique, intrinsic grapheme both satiates and augments her marvel, pushing her practice forward. "My work is and so much nearly borders; physiological, concrete, racial, class etc… San Francisco is a city that continually pushes extremes and these acceptable/non adequate borders," she says. "I like how San Francisco nudges at my comfort zone all the time. I detect myself questioning the norm because of the conversations I get to have with thinkers, writers and artists that inhabit this city, such as Rebecca Solnit and Jennifer Locke. They inspire me and challenge me into seeing different vantage points and perspectives." Unique opportunities afforded to her locally also instigate her means of thinking and looking creatively at the ideas surrounding her creative interests. "Over the last 10 years I have grown into an artist as well every bit a more open up human being beingness thanks to the astonishing and courageous inhabitants of the Bay Area…San Francisco has been an immense back up for me, my work, and instruction art to all sorts of communities."

Fernandez's personal life and experiences are the main influence in the development of her work. She excavates her personal stories for meaning in order to engage with more universal ideas. "My personal experience is the foundation of my piece of work. What I have seen, felt and touched in my life provokes my initial visual screenplays for my performances — what I have experienced going dorsum and forth across country lines, being bi-cultural. And now, traveling and living in other countries, fuels me fifty-fifty more. I have more than points of views and more experiences from which to grab and narrate in my piece of work." Born in Tampico, Mexico, Fernandez mines from her experiences in Mexico, immigrating to the United States and beyond to engage with greater ideas of borders, both literal and figurative too as communities, sexuality, and race to explore and even further redefine through a wide variety of media including performance, video, and painting.

Ana Teresa Fernandez, Arrastre at Gallery Wendi Norris

She is returning to San Francisco but days before her solo show, Strange Bodies at Gallery Wendi Norris opens on April three in which she will display all new work that explores how women navigate geographic, social, and physiological boundaries between the United States and Mexico. "Foreign Bodies has been my most challenging exhibition," she says. "It is starting time of all my most vulnerable. My paintings are what feel safe for me, and Foreign Bodies has everything: installation, video, photographs which I have never dared to prove before. And even my paintings, they are some of the near challenging performances I've done… this entire show is about coming of age and passages of growth through rebellion." Fernández's performances explore how women and their bodies are symbolic of shifting political and social atmospheric condition, and she documents them in photographs and paintings. An emotionally complex serial of photographic prints, the Arrastre series, which will be on view documents the artist'south performance as she rode a white horse inside sinkhole waters in Mexico, exploring an intriguing relationship betwixt animal, creative person, and a body of h2o loaded with personal and historical importance. "As a very young child I wanted to exist Alex, the kid in Francis Ford Coppola's motion-picture show the Black Stallion, which was a metaphor for Alexander the Bully's showtime coming of age or conquest, a black equus caballus. I mixed that metaphor as well as the prince rescuing a woman on a white equus caballus. Just instead I went to a sink hole in Mexico where thousands of virgins had been drowned every bit sacrificial offerings to the gods. I went into the sink pigsty and attempted to ride a wild white stallion, equally a fashion to reclaim or change the history of that site. I came of age for many women who never got to come of age. Information technology was a rebellious human action such equally painting the border out, erasing a bit of history, as a poetic politic stance."

Some other series of paintings that will also exist on view in Foreign Bodies memorializes a performance along the USA and Mexico edge, "Borrando la Frontera" from 2011 that is exemplary of many pervading themes in Fernández's work. After painting a portion of the argue a sky blue that essentially visually obliterates the sectionalisation, Fernández attempts to fit her body betwixt the blue-painted runway, creating a heightened surrealistic performance. "My torso is squeezing between two pieces of 'sky.' I hateful it is quite surreal. I allow myself go and actually tried to push the magic and surreal aspect within the real…" In this way, Fernández's paintings play an extraordinary role and push the medium across its own definitions, as the paintings meantime certificate and reimagine the functioning. She creates an intriguing relationship between documentation of the functioning as non-fiction and the act of painting, which is oftentimes perceived as fictive, enriching the experience and material with more than thoughtful layers. "Painting has held such a fictive and mostly male dominated view: I recollect of Ingres adding 3 or more vertebras to a woman'due south back to make it look more than beautiful. Or I think of Orientalism and the idealization of the other. In painting performance I depict the truth, something that really did take place in infinite….Documentary work often states facts, simply with my piece of work, I wish to question the given."

Ana Teresa Fernandez, "Foreign Bodies" volition exist at Gallery Wendi Norris 161 Jessie Street through May 31, 2014.

hillsatchis.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.gallerywendinorris.com/news-reviews/2014/4/3/interview-ana-teresa-fernandez-foreign-bodies-at-gallery-wendi-norris