Toyo (Manzanar), View from here series, 2016
Noah (Joshua Tree), View from here series, 2016
Cabot (Desert Hot Springs), View from here series, 2017
Thelma (Pt. Fermin), part I (left panel), View from here series, 2017
Juanita (Pt. Fermin), part II (right panel), View from here series, 2017
Laura (Aguilar) Los Angeles, View from here series, 2018
Christina Fernandez (American, b. 1965)
View from here, 2016-2019
Archival color pigment print 22.5 x 15 in.; 23 x 15.75 in. framed
Los Angeles-based artist Christina Fernandez creates both formal and conceptual imagery working with themes that include migration, labor, gender, and the cultural and historical relationship between the US and Mexico.
In View from here (2016–2019), Fernandez presents closely-cropped photographs of windows and doorframes taken from inside artist studios and places of shelter. Fernandez considers these works conceptual portraits and imagines artists like Noah Purifoy, a leader in the Los Angeles Black Arts movement, looking through his studio window onto the Mohave desert in Noah (Joshua Tree), 2016. According to the artist, “The view is a stand-in for what they may have imagined, their vision of what they were doing, our interpretation of that moment. The window, because of its vertical orientation, is a stand-in for their bodies.” These images, taken in locations like Desert Hot Springs, Joshua Tree, Point Fermin, and Manzanar, the latter a former site of a Japanese internment camp, examine the interchange between private and public space. Of this series, the artist says, “I suppose the windows can represent a type of escape, but also the prospect of another day, another life, a dream, a vision.”
Fernandez’s photographs are held in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among several others.
More information on Christina Fernandez can be found here: