A SMOCA survey of Christina Fernandez’s career is very much in focus.
Some of the artist Christina Fernandez’s works depict windows and doorways through which blurry landscapes can be seen.
“Those are an invitation to look through at the view,” the photographer tells me. “Much like I look into the viewfinder of my camera.”
Fernandez lives in Los Angeles, where she co-chairs the photography department at Cerritos College. She’s just seen screenshots of the installation of her work at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and is excited about the exhibition, Multiple Exposures, a survey of her four-decade career on display through early January.
“Windows are a way to break up the two-dimensional space, the flat plane we’re looking at, and get beyond it,” she says.
I ask if she worries that people would think she couldn’t find the focus ring on her camera, and she assures me she trusts people to know she’s emulating the idea of the unknown by creating a space that’s full of question marks.
Fernandez, who’s 58, jokes that she’s actually a little old for a survey of her work. “They should have come to me when I was younger,” she tells me. “I have so much work by now, we had to exclude a lot of my earlier work and most of the more recent work. We ended up focusing on the series I created between grad school and 2018.”
“But don’t you think that photography is less special to people,” I ask, “now that everyone has a camera on their phone and can take pictures all day long?”
She doesn’t think so. “I think everyone having a camera is the counterbalance to analog photography, where you had to compose the image, and expose it properly, then wait for the prints to come back from the lab to see if you got it right. The mystery of doing it right is gone, and now we all have a more intimate relationship with photography. And that’s a good thing.”
