Projection screen (Black Onyx) (Primary Title)
Teresita Fernández, American, born 1968 (Artist)
"Although I think of myself as a conceptual artist, I give a lot of importance to the sensual and sensorial aspects of engagement." —Teresita Fernández
Fernández often takes elemental, natural phenomena like fire, water, ice, and smoke as her starting point. She then makes highly distilled illusions that invoke both the thing itself and blatantly artificial representations of these phenomena. In this way, her work addresses her overlapping interests in problems of perception and in the cultural fabrication of “nature.” In Projection Screen, hundreds of tiny polished halfspheres of black onyx affixed directly to the wall yield a rectangular dark form surrounded by a paler aura. The effect demonstrates a phenomenon, well knownsince the late 19th century, in which our brains consolidate many and diverse pieces of information into a greater whole. At the same time, the form seems to resist such cohesion, as if caught in the process of expanding or contracting.
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