| Archive Project 18: Christina Fernadez |
|
|
Christina Fernandez's Essay |
Images from the Exhibition Chirstina Fernandez Home Page Archive - Spring 2003 Home |
The Project Series
Project 18: Christina Fernandez
In past work, Fernandez’s interest in using photography to explore the trans-personal has manifested itself in topographical studies of social and archeological landscape sites and semi-documentary narrative tableaus. Using the strategy of photo-narrative, she typically examines a specific subject or environment through a combination of documentation and artifice. In Manuela S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D (1996), Fernandez combined stark formal photographs of anonymous East Los Angeles garment factories with fragments of an often poignant text, to create a subtle message about sweatshop labor. In her Multiple Exposure series (1999), Fernandez re-photographed images of Mexican women taken by well-known photographers, and using multiple exposures, inserted a ghost-like image of herself onto the historical image. In contrast to the personal tenor of this work, her topographical images highlight a formalist, reductive approach to the landscape in the manner of photographers Lewis Baltz and Anthony Hernandez.
With this current body of work, Lavanderia, Fernandez conflates her interests in exploring the personal and historical, utilizing a formal, frontal aesthetic, and expanding the documentary traditions of photography. Photographers have long been interested in labor—from Lewis Hine’s early twentieth-century documentation of underage factory workers to Dorothea Lange’s photographs of harsh Depression realities in rural America. With Lavanderia, Fernandez extends this documentary tradition to domestic labor.
In the Lavanderia photographs, Fernandez attempts something entirely new to her—capturing the movement of people and the artificial light of night through photography. To do this, she photographs storefronts at night using a 4 x 5 view camera with very long exposures, enabling her to capture simultaneously the domestic activity within the building and the graffiti on its windows. The graffiti’s calligraphic flow acts as a record of movement that mirrors the lyrical physical movements of the people inside the buildings. Fernandez is also concerned with capturing the aesthetic of light in urban spaces—as exemplified in Edward Hopper’s paintings of isolated city dwellers—and the architectural relationships of building facades and interiors.
Christina Fernandez’s exhibition is the eighteenth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.
Rebecca McGrew
Curator
Copyright © 2003 Pomona College • Pomona College Museum of Art • 330
North College Way • Claremont, CA 91711