SFAI's Ana Teresa Fernandez

Courtesy of the artist

Ana Teresa Fernandez, "Untitled"

Courtesy of the artist

Ana Teresa Fernandez, "Untitled"

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Artist’s Contact:

ragazza0007@yahoo.com

http://www.Anateresafernandez.com

Artist's Statement:

As a young girl in Mexico, I learned at an early age about the double standard imposed on women and their sexuality. “Los hombres quieren a una dama en la mesa, y a una puta en la cama,” (“Men want a lady at the table, and a whore in the bed”) is a statement I heard at 15, and it still lingers in my ears.

For contemporary women, it is often difficult to reconcile the ubiquitous images of whore and virgin in our culture: clean vs. dirty. It is a fine line that becomes the point of demarcation for women to dance around. I explore these territories that encompass different types of boundaries, psychological as well as physical, through performance-based paintings.

I first painted women dressed in tango attire performing cleaning activities or domestic chores within the home. As in Tango, the women duel their partner, the environment. I use the body as a device for exploration that pushes and pulls the space to its limits, activating it until one feels it pushing back.

I then transfer the private actions associated with domestic chores into public settings through my paintings. The dance becomes a battle and amalgamation between physical expectations, advertisement and predetermined gender notions versus instinctual desires and self-empowerment.

I exalt the outlines that define the confinement in the architectural space that try to divide expected behavior and self-expression. I blur the distinction of my subject’s identity: mother, wife, lover, housekeeper, sister or sexualized other. This in turn questions the viewer’s notion of intimacy with her and the symbolic socio-political stance that evaporates her identity.

My work in painting, performance and installation demonstrates how women identify their strengths and sensuality in performing labor in which there is no visible economic or social value, and most often is seen as dirty.

This intangible dilemma provoked me to do a performance at the San Diego/Tijuana Border, a place I myself had to cross to study and live in the US. In this performance, I used the multiplication of self and the never-ending task of cleaning the environment—sweeping the sand on the beach and vacuuming a dirt road—to accentuate the idea of disposable labor resource.

As in cleaning, the task itself must be done repetitively with no hopes of a promotion or escalating reward. The irony is used to mimic the ongoing social political conflicts that infiltrate people’s home through social osmosis.

Hierarchy and dominance is the product of exclusion by the physical walls that stand vertically dividing countries. They underscore the intersection of everyday tasks and fantasy from both sides of the political/gender divide. This in turn penetrates the private by the psychological walls that confine and divide genders in a domestic space.

Selected Exhibitions:

09/06: “3rd Annual National Juried Exhibition”; Art League of Northern California, Novato, Calif.: Finalist, awarded 2nd place by juror Francis McCormack;

07/06: “Nan Mitan-an”; First solo exhibition at Fondation d’Art Jacmel, Haiti;

07/06: “Cream from the Top”; Juried exhibition, Art Benicia Gallery, Benicia, Calif.;

05/06: “Vernissage”; San Francisco Art Institute MFA Show, Fort Mason, San Francisco;

05/06: “2nd City Council Gallery Juried Show”; Long Beach, Calif.; Juried by Alma Ruiz, curator of Museum of Contemporary Art/Los Angeles;

02/06: “(RE)Generation”; Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco

09/05: “Murphy and Cadogan Exhibition”; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco

05/05: Spin Gallery, San Raphael, Calif.

About the San Francisco Art Institute:

At the San Francisco Art Institute, art is more than objects and processes; it is also a way of thinking, an approach to both knowledge and the world itself.