[Man] A landscape that might have one meaning for me and another meaning for you.
It opens up possibilities for interpretation that take us to other places based upon personal
experience.
My name is Franklin Sirmans, I am the director of The Perez Art Museum Miami and I'm also
a co-curator of Teresita Fernandez Elemental.
Think about landscape for instance as in terms of being a genre specifically of sort of traditional
art making experiences.
She explodes that traditional idea completely on it's head.
One way that she describes her relationship to creating landscapes, is she calls them
stacked landscapes.
To suggest this idea that there is almost like sedimentary layers which relates to geology
in the same way, but more metaphorically in that we are looking at layers of time that
are part of the experience of any landscape so there is a direct reference to a colonial
landscape.
[Teresita Fernandez] I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what the landscape
actually looked like before colonization.
The landscape and the land and the Americas was manipulated in very sophisticated ways
for thousands of years before Europeans ever arrived.
I like to think of like Italo Calvino.
This idea of invisible cities in a way right their they might have a reference point in
the mind of the artist or when she's creating them, but they allow for us to see things
in a way that is much broader.
This is Nocturnal Horizon Line work that's been created by graphite all of it painting
or shall you say sculpture?
It has elements of both.
If you look at the top of that surface you see this kind of this sheen, this king of
glare that almost makes it have qualities of reciprocity of being almost like a mirror.
And then you go down a little bit and the graphite is kind of a little bit thicker creating
this horizon line and creating this kind of texture that almost looks like it could be
waters, perhaps it could be seascape, and then you go a little bit further and it gets
thicker and it feels like the earth.
So maybe we've gone from the sky down below through the ocean and into the ground below.
Maybe.
At the end of the day, this is a really beautiful painting.
It's one of my favorites in the exhibition and I'm glad we got to talk about it a little
bit.
Our exhibition ends with a series of works that are around the thematic of landscape
and fire.
Right so the entire exhibition being called Elemental.
And you can see the hand in that and you can see like there are little tiny pieces of mosaic
that make up this whole.
And so much of here work is about looking at the things that make up a whole.
In the case of going directly on the walls there is clearly an immediacy to that gesture
that is part of the moment and it can not be divorced from the moment.
You know they came at a moment where it just seemed completely inappropriate to be subtle.
You know those pieces were about American violence and they were about the land and
like the destruction of the land in many ways.
Right.
And so, just the climate seemed like it wasn't appropriate to just make it about something
abstract.
And a part, a big part of who she is, is an activist in addition to being an artist.
And I think those things can be one and the same.
And in her body and practice it really is.
So there coming to the floor in a much bigger way I would say right now, but they've always
been there.