New exhibit debuts with reception event at di Rosa

Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art will present the exhibit “Listen Louder: Ana Teresa Fernández.”

In her largest career survey to date, San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist Fernández shows paintings, sculptures and films, alongside site-specific installations and performances exploring the intersection of migration and climate change.

Land-based installations – including a glittering ‘SHHH’ floating on di Rosa’s Winery Lake, and an exhortation to ‘LISTEN’ visible from Sonoma Highway – encourage us to listen louder to the earth, and each other. Inside the gallery the exhibition features paintings, sculptures, videos, and photographs from major projects including “At the Edge of Distance” (2022), “Of Bodies and Borders” (2018 – 2019) and “Borrando La Frontera” (Erasing the Border) (2011/2021) which foreground Fernández’s continued inquiry into narratives around the border.

Fernández’s rigorous practice emerges from site-specific interventions and embodied actions, and her work frequently meditates on how borderlands delimit movement and stasis; freedom and detention; even life and death. Through enacted narratives, she embodies the stories that divide but also bind us as human beings sharing a planet of great fragility and beauty.

“The physical border dividing the United States and Mexico is six inches wide, yet the perils built upon that divide stretch hundreds of miles in either direction. The hate and fury that the border evokes manifests itself in militia members with assault rifles on either side of this divide, and detention centers where families are severed indefinitely while incarcerated in ice-cold concrete rooms. We are in a moment where we insist that we hold our actions and encounters at a distance, but this is not the social distance of a pandemic; this is the distance from our hearts to our minds,” Fernández said in a news release.

Fernández draws on site-specific actions at the border between Tijuana and San Diego, a frequent site of intervention in the artist’s work. Wrapped in a silver mylar emergency blanket – originally developed by NASA in the 1960s – Fernández holds the blanket against a laundry line as its mirrored surface reflects the light and flutters in the wind. The blanket obscures the artist’s body, a doubled effect that suggests both the comfort of cover as well as a chilling erasure of self.

“We are honored to work with the City to highlight the work of this important artist,” Kate Eilertsen, di Rosa’s executive director, said in a news release. “Her work raises vital questions about links between border politics and our changing planet, questions especially relevant to Napa and Sonoma communities.”

The exhibition coincides with the unveiling of Circulation, Fernández’s major new public art commission for the City of Napa.

"Circulation represents the interconnection we need to provide life and sustain the ability to grow,” Fernández said in a news release. “the pulse of our community that intersect the lives of people who harvest the land as much as the people who enjoy the fruits. The sculpture’s lines evoke the rows of vines which host grapes from all over the world, side by side. Similarly, many hands from all walks of life, and different parts of the world, work side by side braiding this connection. Napa exists and thrives because work visas allow migrants access to come from afar and work the land. An invisible constellation has made this circulatory system possible.”

An opening reception for the public will be held on Saturday, Oct. 7 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Tickets $10 per person and free for di Rosa members, available at dirosaart.org.