Every photographic frame implies a framer, a view finder at the viewfinder. The camera has an operator, it is assumed, even if their presence remains implicit. 在她过去三十年的工作中, Christina Fernandez has often made her physical position explicit, by shooting through windows and doors and including those architectural frameworks within the bounds of the photograph. 考虑到她一直专注于分娩, 迁移, 身份, 拉丁裔洛杉矶, this formal strategy readily extrapolates into metaphor and politics, subtly prompting such questions as: What social forces are at play here? 这种形象是如何延续或破坏假设的? Who stands outside of the pictured realm, and whose habitat lies within? 局内人与局外人之间的权力动态是什么? The frame reads anew as the delineation of a scope of understanding, 而且不只是艺术家的, 而是我们自己的. At once, the frame announces and challenges the limits of what we see and know.
The “staging of vision and the ethics of looking” are at the core of Fernandez’s work, writes Roberto Tejada in the fine catalogue accompanying the artist’s first museum survey exhibition, 克里斯蒂娜·费尔南德斯:多重曝光. 这个节目, organized by California Museum of Photography (CMP) senior curator Joanna Szupinska, 将在CMP展出至2月5日, 2023, 并将在2025年之前在全国推广.
1965年出生于洛杉矶, 她还在哪里生活和工作, Fernandez bears the same educational resume that has served many of her peers as an on-ramp to wide recognition: undergraduate degree from UCLA (where Joyce Niemanas and Chris Burden were influential), and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (where studying with Allan Sekula was the draw). 她的展览历史, 除了在南加州稳定的个人演讲之外, has been weighted toward shows themed around Chicano 身份 and the art of California, 这两者都是她工作的重要基础. CMP展览, 尤其是这本书, 有大量的贡献者, promise to situate Fernandez more broadly within lineages of New Topographics and staged and narrative photography. “My identification as a Chicana is very solid and I’m comfortable with that,” she says. “这是一个适合我和我的工作的术语.” Multiple Exposures will certainly expand our understanding of Fernandez’s motivations and approaches. “Maybe,” she adds, “it can also expand what we think of as Chicano art.”
这个节目 takes its title from a 1999 series of eight images that layer Fernandez’s self-portraits with appropriated reproductions of photographs of indigenous women in Mexico by Tina Modotti, 纳洛佩兹, 曼纽尔Álvarez好极了, 以及加布里埃尔·菲格罗亚. 在未命名的多重曝光#3 (López), Fernandez assumes a standing pose echoing that of the subject’s in the earlier picture by Lopez. The portraits merge but imperfectly; they are slightly offset, like a visual stutter. The arms of López’s subject gently join in front of her body and seem to also wrap around Fernandez, 在差异中暗示亲属关系, 同时有差异的联系.
Issues of inheritance and ancestry also drove Fernandez’s earlier, 激动人心的项目, María大远征(1995-96), in which she re-enacted her great-grandmother’s journey from Mexico into and through the American southwest via photographs, 文本, 还有一张地图. 它的形式和女权主义倾向, the piece brings to mind Eleanor Antin’s performative practice of inhabiting both fictional and historical figures. Fernandez’s piece reads as both an homage to her great-grandmother’s fortitude and a critique of traditional historical narratives that exclude such stories of female-centered, domestic-scaled acts of courage in favor of charting and lionizing male, 帝国主义的野心.
劳动注意事项, 尤其是未被认可的劳动力, 渗透到另外两个重要的作品中, in which Fernandez put visual emphasis on the particularities and implications of place. In a 2002-03 group of color, nighttime views into laundromats in Latinx-dominated east L.A., Fernandez uses the doorways and panes of the glass facades to neatly structure her compositions, while the graffiti etched upon those surfaces and the blurred contours of the activity within impose a charged distance between outside observer and interior reality, 在推测和经验之间.
That division is even more pronounced in Manuela S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D (1996-2000), a sequence of frontal views of the exteriors of small garment factories, 他们的门上了锁,窗户上了闩. 这个系列在很大程度上归功于刘易斯·巴尔茨的远见卓识, 费尔南德斯适应了谁的冷静姿态, while adding her own brand of narrative heat through an introductory panel of embroidered 文本 that evokes one woman’s fear after a worksite raid by la migra. Fernandez excels at invoking complex historical and societal issues through attention to individuals, 无论他们的故事多么抽象或简短. She does this relatively quietly in the most recent series in the exhibition, 从这里看(2017-19), by foregrounding the 文本ures and dimensions of private portals through which other artists have regarded their surrounding landscapes – Laura Aguilar’s garden-view window with stones on the sill, 例如, or Noah Purifoy’s doorframe whose mix of materials qualifies it as an assemblage in itself.
That continuity between the personal and the political resonates forcefully in a sculptural installation Fernandez first made as an undergraduate and remade as a photo-piece at CalArts. 无题农场工人(1989/2020) 克里斯蒂娜·费尔南德斯:《皇冠体育app》, at the Benton Museum of Art at 皇冠体育大学, one of two companion shows to Multiple Exposures. (另, Tierra Entre media, 在UCR艺术学院, 毗邻CMP, brings new work by Fernandez together with work by three younger Chicanx photographers – Arlene Mejorado, 莉莎特奥利瓦, 和艾迪娜尼斯·奥尔蒂斯,她选择了他们共享的, 利益交叉的地方, 人格, 内存, 家庭, 和归属感.)