Still of the virtual installation on New Art City.
Join the community online for the second installation of Of Here From There | De Aquí Desde Allá with artist Ana Teresa Fernández.
Ana Teresa Fernández, Creativity Explored, and Gray Area present Of Here From There | De Aquí Desde Allá, the first large-scale digital installation featuring CE artists with developmental disabilities.
Created in partnership with Ana Teresa Fernández, the virtual installation immerses visitors with fantastical, large-scale sculptures with time-lapse videos showing the process of mark-making by over 50 CE artists. Sculptural surfaces provide an original format for the undulating brush strokes, depicting a series of original artworks created in real-time.
Keeping true to its physical debut in 2020, the online installation incorporates an interactive virtual experience. A virtual walkthrough with Fernández, performances, and archival elements from its opening event bring the visitor into an immersive digital world.
“Their voices are their marks, their depictions,” Fernández notes. "Their work is how they narrate or explain how it is they see the world. And through this collaboration, we wanted to recreate their magical landscape. A moment where we can be and exist in that world of marks."
Watch our Virtual Tour with Ana Teresa Fernández
About the project
The videos capture the artists’ drawing processes, from Jose Nuñez’s dense repeating bird figures to the growing labyrinths of lines of Roland Record. These images multiply and spread quickly over the white surfaces of the giant flowers, a massive cloud, starfish with cowboy boots, and a flock of eyeballs designed by CE artists in the installation.
In 2019, Fernández facilitated more than 15 art making workshops at Creativity Explored as a visiting artist-in-residence, initially exploring ideas of movement, migration, home, and place with the artists. But Fernández’s vision evolved as she became increasingly interested in their very personal visual vocabularies and intricate mark-making, documenting every step of the artists’ artmaking process. Examples of the 70 videos that will be used in the installation are available through Creativity Explored’s Instagram profile. More videos and information about the process behind the exhibition are documented on the Creativity Explored Tumblr.
The inaugural installation first opened on March 6, 2020 at San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). That following week, the city of San Francisco went into lockdown and the installation was halted abruptly, preventing most of the public from experiencing the live event. More than one year later, the installation has once again evolved and is now reimagined into an immersive online experience where it will live indefinitely and be accessible globally.
The installation will be on view from May 6, 2021 online and accessible at New Art City’s website. The virtual experience will include live performances and archived performances from its preceding physical premiere by poet Leticia Hernández Linares, dancer Vanessa Sanchez (La Mezcla), and musician Tommy Guerrero.
Of Here From There | De Aquí Desde Allá is generously supported by Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Grants for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and California Arts Council.
About Ana Teresa Fernández
anateresafernandez.com | @anateresafernandez
Ana Teresa Fernández, born in 1980 in Tampico, Mexico, lives and works in San Francisco. Her work explores the politics of intersectionality through time-based actions and social gestures, translated into masterful oil paintings, installations and videos.
Within her work, performance becomes a tool for investigation as strong feminist undercurrents flow together with post-colonial rhetoric. Through her work, the artist illuminates the psychological and physical barriers that define gender, race, and class in Western society and the global south.
Fernández has exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, Arizona State University Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, the Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, Humboldt State University, Eureka, CA; the Tijuana Biennial, Tijuana, Mexico; Snite Museum at Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, IN; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA and The Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, CA.
About Gray Area
Gray Area is San Francisco's premier cultural hub catalyzing creative action for social transformation – applying antidisciplinary practice towards some of the most complex challenges facing our world. Gray Area’s mission prioritizes cultivating, sustaining, and amplifying a diverse creative community. For over a decade, Gray Area has generated platforms that enable creators of diverse backgrounds and perspectives who defy categorization to transcend boundaries within deep artistic collaboration. Over 50% of artists in Gray Area’s most impactful programs amplify historically underrepresented communities.
About New Art City
Our gallery partner is New Art City, an online multiplayer exhibition space for digital art and performance. Their 3D gallery toolkit allows artists and curators to build new types of exhibition spaces that can be accessed by hundreds of simultaneous visitors from all over the world with no need to register or download anything. They are an artist-run organization dedicated to supporting artists, providing virtual space for those who are denied physical space, and amplifying the work of those who face systemic injustice.
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