LACMA

152 CHRISTINA FERNANDEZ Many of Christina Fernandez's photographs examine the distance between self and other, history and memory, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible. Here, distance need not imply detachment or disinterest; rather, it functions as a concep- tual framework that emphasizes the asymmetry of such relationships. Perhaps it occurs most poignantly between the artist and her subject. The photographs in Fernandez's series Maria's Great Expedition (1995) are based on family stories about her great-grandmother's move from her hometown in Mexico to the United States in 1910. The series is composed of pseudo-documentary vignettes of a single mother making her way through the Southwest, as in the photographs 1930 Transporting Produce, Outskirts Phoenix, Arizona, and 1950, San Diego, California. The accompanying text offers a record of Maria's personal journey that also delves into the social and political context of immigration, labor, race, and gender issues. Maria's Great Expedition is much more complicated than just the transfer of oral history into photographic record. Fernandez reanimates her great-grandmother's experiences by including herself as the subject of each photograph. In the character of her great-grandmother she provides a form of self-representation that is not a straightforward self-portrait. Instead, her approach allows for grappling with the past in the present. Situating herself as her great-grandmother, and in relation to a narration of her own life, Fernandez allows for a personal recounting in which one exists in the present relative to the past, in dialogue with past lives. However, she does not collapse the distance between her life and her great-grandmother's, but instead makes visible the act of tending to one's history as a process that occurs in the present. It is a process that ultimately resists letting the past become too distant from the self. Informed by the long tradition of documentary photographers in the United States, Fernandez's Manuela S-t-i-t-c-h-e-d (1996), a series of eight photographs, takes hidden labor as its subject matter. The photographs depict the exteriors of name- less buildings in East Los Angeles; their windowless, wrought-iron entrances forbid access to their interiors, as if the buildings are obstinately determined to maintain their separation from public life. Looking at these unidentified photo- graphs, it is difficult to discern the function that unifies these structures—in fact, all of them are sweatshops for garment workers. When they are exhibited, Fernandez includes a panel of machine- embroidered text on cloth that provides a fictional story of a garment worker's day, though it is based on the artist's inter- views with the women who work in these factories. Within the exhibition space, Fernandez's work defers any overt political expression. She does not provide portraits of the women who work in the sweatshops, and thereby sidesteps the objectification of her subjects. The series of buildings might be mistaken as commentary on aesthetically wanton urban architecture, or perhaps an ironic version of Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip or 50 Gas Stations. Further, the fictional story that accompanies the images is also removed from the personal due to its mechanical reproduction. Fernandez's formal approach engenders distance. And, yet, it is this overall absence of affect inside the exhibition space that can prompt political engagement with the hidden presence of labor exploitation and injustice not overtly visible beyond the art gallery. In 2004, Fernandez turned her camera toward the personal space of her Los Angeles studio in the ongoing series Space Available, which depicts relatively empty rooms. In one photograph, old, discarded canvases unfurl on the floor while stretcher bars that once contained canvases rest against the opposite wall. In another, someone leaves the studio with a crated work. The interiors gesture toward what is unrealized in the artistic process—the vexing distance between the real- ization and the unaccomplished. What Fernandez offers is an ominous warning that past work and exhibitions do not forestall the anxiety of available space in the unfinished present. —MARIO ONTIVEROS

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