The Armory Show, Platform
Rewriting Histories
Curated by Eva Respini
September 7-10, 2023
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Teresita Fernández’s inclusion in Rewriting Histories, the Armory Show’s Platform presentation, on view at the Javits Center from September 7–10, 2023. Curated by Eva Respini, Rewriting Histories brings together large-scale works and site-specific installations by artists who challenge accepted beliefs surrounding history, art, and culture. The presentation will feature Fernández’s Island Universe 2 (2023), a large-scale, charcoal wall installation that elegantly combines all of the Earth’s landmasses, fusing them into one continuous, borderless terrain. “The artists included in Rewriting Histories explore complex histories often tied to colonialism, land, and power” states Respini. “Teresita Fernández’s monumental Island Universe 2 re-images global territories, visualizing the interconnected geological, cultural, and historical relationships of geographies. Made of charcoal, this installation illustrates so well Fernández’s interest in uncovering what she refers to as ‘stacked landscapes’—the conceptual framework that allows her work to reveal the often invisible, buried layers of historical violence embedded in land.”
Created specifically for this presentation, Fernández’s Island Universe 2 disrupts conventions of mapmaking, representing the world’s continents and archipelagos as a single landmass evoking the early geologic supercontinent of Pangaea. Denaturalizing geographic and political borders, Fernández’s provocative work fervently challenges traditional understandings of geography, landscape, and nation—in particular, the view of North as the inherently superior “up” and the reciprocal positioning of South as the inferior “down”.
As she dispenses with traditional mapping conventions, Fernández asks viewers to evaluate their own subtle biases and adopt new points of reference. Maps, the artist observes, are not neutral depictions of place—they reflect and reinforce dominant cultural and political ideologies. “Place is an entirely social construct, always attached to narratives of power and dominance,” Fernández states. “Places are named by the winners, by the oppressors. Maps are drawn up in the same way.” By visualizing a borderless world and untethering maps from their connections to colonial power, Fernández’s Island Universe 2 engenders states of productive disorientation; in the process, she initiates viewers in moments of conceptual “wayfinding,” prompting them to relocate themselves and renegotiate their relationships to both power and place.
Composed of hand-sculpted solid charcoal, Island Universe 2 also reflects Fernández’s careful consideration of materiality and her conception of place is capacious and ever-evolving. “Materials aren’t just materials,” the artist has stated. “Materials are parts of places.” Using raw charcoal extracted from the earth, Fernández draws attention to the myriad ways that natural resources circulate in a global world. She demonstrates how landscape continually reveals its multiplicity, bearing signs of intercontinental exchange and colonial power. As Fernández uncovers the many layers of history, culture, and politics embedded in place, she envisions the notion of the “stacked landscape,” an understanding of place that embraces the many social and historical dimensions embedded within any single location, and therefore eludes easy or definitive delineation on a map.
In Island Universe 2 and throughout Fernández’s practice, landscape is not merely a passive subject, but an active and ongoing process of formation. The artist has stated that she explores the duality of the notion of landscape, embracing it as “both a verb and a noun simultaneously.” To visualize place, Fernández suggests, is also ultimately to construct it.