TERESITA FERNANDEZ

In visceral installations of Teresita Fernandez ask viewers to look - at look again

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS CRITIC
Sunday, November 01, 2009

Teresita Fernández's is an experiential, physically immersive art. And without the physical presence of the viewer - without you, there - it is incomplete.

Since January, visitors to the Blanton Museum of Art have been completing Fernández's "Stacked Waters," a site-specific installation created for the museum's cavernous two-story atrium. Shimmering acrylic tiles - their hue changing from deep blue to white - ascend the walls, the watery blue shifting in mood as the ever-changing Texas light filters in from skylights. Visitors catch their reflection in the glistening tiles, seduced by the illusion that they are immersed in a pool of water. With their presence, people activate "Stacked Waters." And so, unavoidably, all who encounter it become a part of the artwork itself.

With "Blind Landscape," a retrospective exhibit opening today that's organized by the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, visitors can engage with more of the artist's visceral yet lyrical large-scale work.

The New York-based artist will present a slide-illustrated talk about her work today at 3 p.m. in the Blanton's Auditorium.

Unveiled earlier this year, "Stacked Waters" is a gift to the Blanton from Austin-based collectors Jeanne and Michael Klein. And now the illusory blue pool acts as stunning prelude to an exhibit whose chapters unfold through each of a dozen of Fernández's meticulous installation.

If nothing else, Fernández's work is about the nature of looking. She challenges the often presumptive act of viewing and especially the presumptive act of art-viewing. Forget what you've seen before. Fernández will undermine your frame of reference.

Deftly, precisely, she transforms industrial materials - stainless steel, graphite, glass - into creations that mimic the natural world but are wholly unnatural.

Large overlapping layers of machine-cut super shiny stainless steel - incised with a foliage pattern - stack on the wall in "Portrait (Blind Landscape)," an ingenious re-consideration of traditional landscape paintings, in particular the 19th-century romanticized, luminescent scenes of the American West. There's no romanticism in Fernández's post-industrial landscapes. Instead, the reflective metallic surface bounces your portrait right back at you as your eye shifts back and forth between the details and the whole, the artwork morphing with your movements.

You're a part of "Portrait (Blind Landscape)" whether you want to be or not. You can't lose yourself in the piece if you tried. You are there.

Though not funny per se, Fernández's work is not without a certain latent humor and playfulness. Illusion is a key strategy, optical trickery most definitely at work. There's a gentle punch line lurking somewhere in each of her works.

Take "Drawn Waters (Barrowdale)." The 12-foot-tall sculpture might just be the biggest pencil drawing - or biggest pencil smudge - in the world. Sleek machine-tooled sheets of graphite cascades in a stream out of mid-air and pools in a heap of shiny graphite chunks. "Drawn Waters" swooshes down in a single movement, a gigantic gesture. It's a sculpture that's really drawing, an essentially minimalist exquisitely controlled piece that is nevertheless turbulent with motion.

Get it now? "Drawn Waters" is not what it seems on a first look. Like everything else she creates, "Drawn Waters" accentuates its own artifice.

Born and raised in Miami, the 41-year-old Fernández, who now lives in Brooklyn, garners wide recognition for her work. As the youngest artist commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park, her "Seattle Cloud Cover" gives visitors the chance walk through a covered skyway while viewing the city's skyline through tiny holes punched in multicolored glass. In 2005, she received the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" fellowship. Here in Texas this year, in addition to "Stacked Waters" at the Blanton, Fernández completed "Starfield," a large-scale commission for the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

"Stacked Waters" is on semi-permanent exhibit at the Blanton, likely to be on view for several years to come as it will continue to surprise and engage. But right now, with the current retrospective, a total immersion into Fernández's constantly shifting yet poetic universe is possible.

Hang on - that universe is continuously disassembling and reassembling itself as you look.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699

When: Sunday, Nov. 1 through Jan. 3, 2010

Where: Blanton Museum of Art, Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and Congress Ave.

Cost: $3-$7 (Thursdays free)

Information: 471-7324, www.blantonmuseum.org.

Artist's talk: 3 p.m. today

Cost: Free with museum admission.