Wk1 - Artist Essay - Ana Teresa Fernández
Ana Teresa Fernández
About the Artist
Ana Teresa Fernandez was born in Tampico, Mexico and is now a social sculptor and painter living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fernandez graduated from San Francisco Art Institute in 2004 with a B.F.A, following by an M.F.A in two years later in 2006. Fernandez has created countless of publications and collections, as well as having achieved multiple awards and acknowledgements. One of her art project named 5W was awarded Best of the Bay by 7x7 Magazine in 2013. She was also granted the Tournesol Award and her films have been screened at international festivals.
Formal Analysis
Fernandez’s paintings are often in cool colors, dark colors, or black and white Her painting projects named “Erasure”, “Equilateral”, “Bay Area Now 5”, and “Galeria De La Raza” are very dark in color while her other projects “Foreign Bodies”, “Ablution”, “Telarana”, and “Pressing Matters” are in cool colors. Her techniques of shading and shadowing are so detailed that with a glance one would think her paintings are color-filtered photographs. Her most common media used in her paintings is oil paint and most paintings are done on canvas. With her sculptures, they are of variety and are each installed with lights, metal, glass, ice, and feathers. They are mostly large scale, taking up a full room or a wall of about 100”.
Content Analysis
According to http://www.gallerywendinorris.com/fernandez-ana-teresa/, Fernandez’s works are a social gestures that depict the politics of intersectionality. All of them critique the many assumptions and stereotypes about Latina women, and they display the psychological and physical barriers that define gender, race, and class in Western society and global south. Having women as her inspiration, her artworks symbolize women’s strength and sensuality in the labor process, this includes many labor tasks from mopping floors, ironing shirts, to dragging wet hair along the floor.
Synthesis / My Experience
In her installation "Carry-On" (http://anateresafernandez.com/carry-on/stripes05/), Fernandez is trying to portray something else rather than her usual artworks about women. This installation of a room with every furniture/decoration wrapped in plaid nylon shopping bags is very distinctive from her other works of art. At first I see this room in one same pattern, very distinguishable yet very obscure. It seems like every part of the house, from the ironing table, the broom, the desk, frames, to the books, slip-ons, and shelves, everything is in one pattern. I can say this piece of art is quite questionable in terms of its meaning, with its title, I can only comprehend its vast idea of immigration. After reading the description, I learned that this work displays an immigrant community where immigrants are subjected to a heavy workload of the service industry. Looking at the broom and what looks like a uniform of a janitor, I could visualize her metaphor, other than that, everything else lies in the work's inconspicuousness, and this could possibly be Ana's intention.