RIVERSIDE — In 2010, Christina Fernandez made a panoramic landscape photograph 20 inches high and six feet wide. The extreme format is unlike anything in her work before or since. At the very least it indicates an eager curiosity and desire to experiment, which has been a through-line in her challenging art over the course of 30 years.
Fernandez was born in Los Angeles in 1965 and received her BA from UCLA in 1989 and MFA from the California Institute of Arts in 1996. She has been on the faculty at Cerritos College in Norwalk for three decades. Her career is now the subject of an engrossing exhibition at UC Riverside’s California Museum of Photography. It comes with an excellent catalog assembled by its curator, Joanna Szupinska, including six additional authors, and is happily set to travel to five museums across the country.
The panorama, which comes near the end of the installation, touches on themes and concerns that turn up again and again in Fernandez’s work, albeit in a distinctive way. That begins with the visual specificities of camerawork.
It’s not possible to take in everything at once in a skinny panorama six feet wide, as it might be in a more conventional 8-by-10 print, since you can’t see both ends unless you move to the other side of the room, now too far away to take in essential details. Instead, moving in closer, your eye scans the scene, as if you’re looking around.
That’s the opposite of how we mostly look at photographs now, glimpsed in a quick bite on a phone screen.
...
Not all the work resonates. A series on studio spaces she has vacated over years is inscrutably blank, although it does chronicle a nomadic life and valorize Fernandez’s commitments as a working artist. And two small current shows that Fernandez organized further demonstrate her collegiality — “Tierra Entre Medio,” also at the California Museum of Photography, assembles work by three like-minded Chicana photographers; and “Under the Sun,” at Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, puts her photographs in dialogue with objects she selected from the museum’s collection. Community, multiplicity and discourse among artists are exemplary watchwords of her photographs.