Reflection on Artist's Lecture: Teresita Fernandez

To me, personally, a work of art makes my wheels spin when I am granted a peek into the artist’s views, motivations and thought processes. During Teresita Fernandez’s lecture, the audience in the lecture hall was privileged enough to be given an opportunity to learn what inspired Ms. Fernandez to create her works, some of which are currently on exhibit at USF’s Contemporary Art Museum.

My personal favorite work discussed during Ms. Fernandez’s lecture was an untitled work created in 1996, inspired by a modernistic Parisian home. See Blog Assignment 1 for an image. In the architectural design of the home, the second floor was a swimming pool and the first floor consisted of narrow hallways surrounding the swimming pool. The wall shared by the hallway and the pool had windows to view into and out of the water, and the wall opposite the pool was fully mirrored. Teresita was fascinated with this design, and the voyeuristic tendencies it encouraged, the desire to see and be seen, the potential that existed in window for a swimmer to look through the glass and see their reflection in the mirror—or for someone to look through the glass and see the swimmer. My fascination with voyeurism drew me to the design of her untitled work, in which she modeled the first floor of the modernistic Parisian home and recreated this potential for the viewer to see and be seen, to be watched unknowingly, or to watch others without their knowledge.

Another work I enjoyed was her installation in Seattle, framing the downtown skyline. When Ms. Fernandez first described this work, I was unimpressed, but my view quickly changed when I learned that she was inspired by the emotional skies of French paintings such as Delecroix’s Raft of the Medusa, and even by the skies in the backgrounds of Japanese anime. I began to respect her as an artist who begins with an intriguing idea and researches until she understands, then is able to create and capture the idea with form. The Seattle installation was multifaceted, beautiful, and complimented the vista, morphing with the skies, seasons, and each hour of each day.

The final work which caught my attention was Teresita Fernandez’s rainbow work in which she created thousands of tiny high-polished glass cubes with one colored side and affixed them to the wall. I feel that she truly succeeded in capturing the essence of a rainbow, the natural phenomena that produce rainbows, as well as a rainbow’s ephemeral nature. Her use of thousands of colors, mixed and blended and the use of glass, reflection and light were very effective.

After hearing Ms. Fernandez’s thoughts on her work and learning about the processes in which she creates art, I cannot wait to get back to the Contemporary Art Museum to view some of her works again. As a well-spoken and well-educated artist, her presentation style and down-to-earth attitude made it easy for me to follow her lecture and in turn, made her art much more meaningful to me. It was most definitely a privilege to hear her speak in person.