Teresita Fernández "Night Writing"
Lehmann Maupin (201 Chrystie Street)
This event has ended.
In her fifth solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Teresita Fernández creates works that evoke the dramatic and universal experience of looking at the night sky. The exhibition consists of a single, large-scale installation built on site in the soaring double-height space of the Chrystie Street gallery. Made up of thousands of translucent, colored layers of polycarbonate, the hovering form becomes a sculptural painting, filtering the natural light in the space to create a color field reminiscent of the aurora borealis.
Fernández will also present a related series of unique prints. Created while in residency at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, each unique hand-made pulp work in this series is perforated with braille-like patterns that recall constellations. The title of the series, Night Writing, is a reference to "Écriture Nocturne," a secret code written in the early 19th century to enable Napoleon's soldiers to communicate at night, silently and without light.
The titles of each work have been translated into braille and made into an abstracted composition of points. These points have been superimposed on sumptuous large-scale, printed images of the night sky. Artworks such as Tristan and Isolde, Koh-i-Noor, and Tropic of Cancer are made up of cryptic words lost in an undecipherable code of dots. The works become a statement on the ephemeral quality of language and the attempt to grasp the content hidden within the invisible text. Fernandez's works explore this subtle space between blindness, vision, and the tactile.
An accompanying artist's book, published by the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, is an integral part of this body of work, and includes an essay written by Fernández. “Humans have always looked up for information. Like a vast billboard, the night sky has always been read and scanned for revelation, direction and guidance. The stars have always served as coordinates that ground us to a physical location and time; they offer a sensual orientation,” writes Fernández, whose enlightening essay, both historical and personal, documents her research and sheds light on this subject.
Media
Schedule
from September 12, 2012 to October 20, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-09-12 from 18:00 to 20:00