Teresita Fernández, Visiting Artist Lecture 2019

Teresita Fernández gives a lecture at Skowhegan of her interdisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, video, installation, and photography. Fernández roots her lecture in an ongoing interest in landscape: a landscape that is not passive but seeing the landscape as an idea where one can have larger conversations about place. Fernández tells the participants the importance of always recalibrating where we are and who we are as artists. She frames this question of where we are culturally, racially, socially, historically, geographically, psychologically, and environmentally. Fernández says that sometimes turning one’s back to something as a way of seeing can help unveil what we don’t see. It can lead to us anthropomorphizing the landscape. She uses this notion of turning away to inject vulnerability in her studio practice. Fernández is also interested in blindness and how it is more about not seeing an erasure. One can rephrase blindness in terms of the variety of not seeing: shadows, darkness, inaccessibility, cloaking, peaking, squinting, hiding, camouflaging. Fernández ends her lecture by reflecting on the material of gold in her work. Fernández seeks to use gold as a way to refer to the colonization of history and as a material that is always about the history of landscape, land, conquest, power and erasure. Ultimately for Fernández, the notion of the landscape as a human continues to contain collective and erased memory.