Commonwealth and Council

Box (a proposition for ten years)

Patricia Fernández

Images

Once a year since 2013, “Box (a proposition for ten years)” for  Commonwealth and Council is exhibited with its contents (re-purposed fragments, writings, drawings, paintings, and sculptural elements) as they accumulate, transform, and grow. Through this time-based sculpture, Patricia Fernández fosters a relationship with the space by proposing a personalized exchange system. For our 6th anniversary, “Box” will be presented at Tina Kim Gallery (NY) in a group exhibition titled “Commonwealth and Council” opening on June 28, 2018.


In the front room at Commonwealth and Council, Fernández presents new additions to the “Box” including a daybed with a shelf that holds a porcelain vessel, a postcard, and a model bone ship. A series of sleep paintings hangs amid curtains with embroidered images drawn from a year of dream transcription from Jungian analysis. 


The daybed calls us to sleep. Fernández took this to heart while making the bed, napping and sleeping in it. The headboard, bearing “X” marks like those carved by Fernández’s grandfather, closes around the bed to create another box resembling a chamber, chest, or coffin. Visions of last year’s Perseid meteors, or Tears of St. Lawrence, emblazon the porcelain vessel, combining the myth of Perseus, cast to the sea with his mother in a wooden chest, and the story of St. Lawrence, who cried burning tears. The proposed ship will be made from human bones, and one day carry the artist, her friends, and their posterity to the Island of Formentera, to spend time together among its caves and underground passageways. The wells of Santa Casilda appear on a postcard. The artist and her grandfather, whose carvings are also found there, make an annual pilgrimage to dip their hands in the healing waters.


Fernández began painting sleepers when a found photo led her to portray St. Casilda in repose. These paintings access the peculiar vulnerability of their unconscious subjects, offered here against a sea of blue, in praise of sleep—where dreams, like death, may carry us toward eternal rest.      


Patricia Fernández (b. 1980 in Burgos, Spain; lives and works in Los Angeles) studied at Central Saint Martins, London, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2010). Fernández has exhibited her work at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Spain; LA><ART, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant (2017), Lincoln City Fellowship  (2015), France Los Angeles Exchange (FLAX) Grant (2012), California Community Foundation Fellowship (2011), and Joan Mitchell Grant (2010), and was Artist-in-Residence at Récollets, Paris (2016), D-Flat, CDMX  (2016), Headlands Center for the Arts (2015), 18th Street Arts Center (2014), and Fondazione Antonio Ratti (2013).