SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Gallery Wendi Norris is presenting Erasure, artist Ana Teresa Fernández’ second solo exhibition at the gallery. The artist is exhibiting her latest video, also titled Erasure, the film of a performance she enacted where she carefully painted her own body black until only glimpses of color remain visible. Additionally, she is showing four new paintings produced in her characteristic hyperrealist style, as well as a new sculpture and text installation. One painting depicts a mouth, another shows eyes, another reveals arms, and the last shows the back of a head, all painted on flat black backgrounds. She is exhibiting a new sculpture, a larger than life wooden ladder set atop destabilizing rockers. A text installation describing the act of listening has been embedded into the gallery wall. Together these artworks, each representative of a component of the human body, suggest a political body being torn apart.
The series of works that comprise Erasure derives from the 2014 disappearance of 43 young male students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, who were presumably killed for staging protests that disrupted their small town. Fernández pays tribute to these people, still missing and unaccounted for, as she confronts us with contemporary stories of censorship, hinting that the lack of justice in the disappearance of the young men is intentional, due to governments who fail to protect or value the individual.
With this body of work, Fernández responds to the political situation in Mexico and she continues her quest to give strength to the unheard and unseen, the powerless among us.
Born in 1981 in Tampico, Mexico, she lives and works in San Francisco. Through her work, she explores the politics of intersectionality and the ways it shapes personal identity, culture, and social rhetoric through painting, performance, and video. In 2015 Fernández received widespread press coverage for restaging her 2011 performance Borrando la Frontera, where she painted the Mexico-United States border fence sky blue so that one can easily imagine the landscape without the barrier. Fernández has exhibited at Humboldt State University, Eureka, California; the Tijuana Biennial in Mexico; Snite Museum at Notre Dame University, Indiana; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and The Oakland Art Museum. Her large-scale 5W public art project in San Francisco was awarded Best of the Bay by 7×7 Magazine in 2013. The Headlands Center for the Arts granted Fernández the Tournesol Award and her films have been screened at festivals internationally. In 2015 Humboldt State University published a catalogue on her solo exhibition at the First Street Gallery titled All or Nothing.
