Teresita Fernández

“Landscape is more about what you don’t see than what you do see.”

Apparition (Golden) is an imagined scene that unravels landscape history, place and the fluctuation of power that surrounds natural resources. Using gold and charcoal (which is made from burned trees), the artwork emphasizes the stacked connections between places, people, and materials and reveals the loaded, often omitted connections to colonization and the violence embedded in the landscape. The choice of materials deliberately references the greed that ignited the California gold rush as well as the ongoing devastation caused by wildfires throughout  the region.

In Apparition (Golden), Fernández also summons aspects of what has been rendered invisible in the landscape, hiding in plain sight. She imagines the ghostly remains of Lake Lagunita, (just outside the window), which was an irrigation lake built in the 19th century before ongoing droughts dried up its waters.

The golden, shimmering surface of the artwork challenges conventional ideas of the figure in the landscape and prompts each viewer to linger, and locate themselves as their gaze is returned and distorted within the constructed landscape. Apparition (Golden) asks viewers to consider their own role in the eroded physical and psychological spaces produced by centuries of extraction. Imbuing the landscape with an anthropomorphic sensibility, Fernández has said “You look at the landscape, but the landscape also looks back at you.”