Teresita Fernández’s Shifting Sculptural Landscapes

Born in Miami, Florida, in 1968, to Cuban parents, Fernández incorporates natural resources tied to colonization into work that examines landscape and place; she was awarded a MacArthur grant in 2005. There are a number of emotional elements in the current show, autobiographically speaking, that harken back to her fascinating early examinations of memory. Like the late Cuban-born artist Félix González-Torres, Fernández is interested in the politics of displacement, and what happens to the colonized soul. Although her work bears no visual resemblance to González-Torres’s—such as his haunting photograph of his empty bed sans AIDS-stricken lovers, or his jigsaw series, which depicted his family on a series of puzzle pieces sealed in a plastic bag—Fernández is, like González-Torres, a kind of minimal poet, who is now working in a beautiful new register.