Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures

June 7, 2024

Sept. 27, 2024

This landmark exhibition presents the work of Christina Fernandez, whose photographs and installations explore migration, labor, gender, her Mexican American identity, and the unique capacities of the photographic medium itself. Fernandez is an artist and educator acclaimed for photographs and installations that examine her connections to Los Angeles, the slippages between public and private spaces, personal and historical narratives, urban spaces, and the cultural border and historical relationships between Mexico and the United States.

Informed by her family’s involvement in the Chicano movement, Fernandez’s conceptual practice has for over three decades paired aesthetic inquiry with political commitment. Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures features eight signature bodies of work by the artist that weave between portraiture and landscape photography.

The exhibition is organized into four sections, beginning with Maria’s Great Expedition (1995-96). This installation re-stages key moments in the life of the artist’s maternal great-grandmother, Maria Gonzales. Fernandez poses as her ancestor, creating compositions that recall the history of photography: from Hollywood glamour, to American Depression-era documentary, to the color snapshot. This is paired with Manuela S-T-I-T-C-H-E-D (1996-2000), a series of street views depicting the facades of garment factories in Los Angeles.

The second section features Fernandez’s most recognizable series, Lavandería (2002), consisting of carefully composed color night views into the laundromats of East Los Angeles. These cinematic compositions are paired with the staged and layered black- and-white self-portraits that inspired the title of the exhibition, Untitled Multiple Exposures (1999). These works put the artist’s body in relationship with the bodies of Indigenous women captured by important figures in the history of photography in Mexico.

The third section of the exhibition continues Fernandez’s inquiry about how one moves through the world as an artist first explored in Untitled Multiple Exposures. Fernandez’s Space Available (2004) documents the temporary studio spaces she rented and later vacated when faced with financial or personal hardship. reflect/project(ion) (2017), a series consisting of studied portraits of Fernandez’s students alongside their own camera equipment, explores the roles of mentorship and pedagogy in the field of photography. Continuing this engagement with her wider artistic community, View from Here (2017-19) is a series of windows documented in the homes of various creatives, including the photographers Laura Aguilar (1959-2018) and Toyo Miyatake (1895-1979).

Sereno (2006-10) comprises the final section of the exhibition. This series features photographs produced during the artist’s daily walks with her young son around their predominantly Latinx neighborhood and considers creative resilience, urban sprawl, leisure, economic mobility, and precarity. Gathering these important bodies of work,Fernandez’s first monographic museum exhibition invites us to reconsider history, borders, and the lives that cross and inhabit both.

Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is organized by UCR ARTS and is curated by Joanna Szupinska, Senior Curator at the California Museum of Photography. Chon Noriega, Distinguished Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA, is curatorial advisor. The presentation of this exhibition at the SJMA is organized by Juan Omar Rodriguez, assistant curator.

The San José Museum of Art’s presentation of Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is organized by Juan Omar Rodriguez, assistant curator. The San José Museum of Art presentation is made possible by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous support from Mr. Cole Harrell and Dr. Tai-Heng Cheng.

GO TO OUR YOUTUBE PLAYLIST FOR THE EXHIBIT TO WATCH INTERVIEWS WITH CHRISTINA, JOANNA SZUPINSKA AND MORE.

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About the Artist

Christina Fernandez is a Los Angeles-based photographer who explores her personal connection to LA throughout her body of works. The city and its environs are featured as an important backdrop for her works that address labor, gender, migration, and her Mexican–American identity. Working in documentary format, her urban and landscape photography conveys social and political commentaries regarding her immediate environment. Christina Fernandez is a photographer who is widely recognized for staged, black and white self-portraits, as well as her poetic, formally composed, color street scenes. Fernandez was born in 1965 in Los Angeles, where she currently lives and works.

Fernandez holds an MFA from the California Institute of Arts and a BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. . She is chair of the art department at Cerritos College, where she has been on faculty since 2000. Her work has been featured in major group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Self Help Graphics and Art, Los Angeles; and Galería de la Raza, San Francisco; among others. In 2021, Fernandez received the prestigious Latinx Artist Fellowship, an initiative administered by the US Latinx Art Forum and supported by the Mellon Foundation and Ford Foundation. Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is the first monographic exhibition of her work.

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