Bal Harbour

THE ALLEGORIES ABOUT FIRE are multifaceted: flames destroy, make space, cleanse and renew—consider the Phoenix, the regenerating bird from Greek mythology that rises from the ashes of its former incarnation. For "Teresita Fernández: Elemental," an exhibition opening in October at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Fernández has dedicated an entire gallery to fire. "In considering the title of the show, 'elemental' means the powers of nature—atmospheric, environmental," she explains. "But it also means essential—the raw, underlying, hidden core of something, which is more elusive." Co-curated by Franklin Sirmans, director of the PAMM and Amada Cruz, former director of the Phoenix Art Museum (where the show will travel in 2020) and newly named director of the Seattle Art Museum, "Elemental" is the towering artist's first mid-career survey, a sweeping view of her work from the mid-90s to the present—an oeuvre that is, at once, immersive and intimate. Fernández's public installations and smaller-scale pieces—landscapes, sculptures—have a rapturous quality, manipulating the light or evoking the natural world and, simultaneously, the insular feeling of looking within. Imagine looking out a window, but also daydreaming. Born in 1968 in Miami to Cuban parents and based in New York— the artist has spent time in Japan, the Yucatán and elsewhere, and considers each fundamental to who she's become—Fernández's career is sprawling: in 2011, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and, in 2016, partnered with the Ford Foundation to create and direct the U.S. Latinx Futures Symposium. She avoids pointing to any one perspective in her practice; we're discussing Fire (America) 5 (2017), a glazed ceramic landscape in which a fire has engulfed an evening's blackness, because of its near- endless meanings. "e glossy surface makes it so that you see your own reflection," she says. "Most people don't think of my work as figurative, because there are no 'figures' in it, but I think of it as thoroughly figurative. Rather than depicting one in a representative manner, you are the figure, prompted by the work to always find yourself in the landscape." In Fire (America) 5, which refers to a violently divided country, "the essential component of renewal and redemption… hinges on finding yourself in the landscape." To perceive landscape as something one can be inside is, says Fernández, crucial to understanding her practice, and to "defining who you are in relation to where you are—not just what's in front of your eyes, but the history of human beings, of power and the lack of it. An 'innocuous landscape' is a very Western point of view—humans dominating the landscape," she adds. "But even our ideas about what places are—names, borders—are powerful tools to control how we think of ourselves in relation to the land. When I make the work, there's never a choosing between this experiential, sensual thing, and sociopolitical references. ey're very much inherent in each other." Fernández doesn't cajole or direct you here. e prompting, the call to participate, "is very quiet and very subtle," she says. "What's happening, when it does happen, is on an intimate, viewer-driven scale, and that means it can be very powerful. It's not always visible." In the end, it's up to the viewer: their internal experience, their own interpretation to mull over, whether they see the work multiple times or never again. "I've often talked about the viewer being both spectator and complicit performer. at kind of engagement is slow or quiet—enough for you to recall it after the work's no longer in front of you." 126 BAL HARBOUR "Teresita Fernández: Elemental" is on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami from October 18, 2019 through February 9, 2020. PHOTO BY ELISABETH BERNSTEIN; COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, AND SEOUL. Viñales (Reclining Nude), 2015

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