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Ana Teresa Fernández
Borrando La Frontera

Ana Teresa Fernandez writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico. I painted them sky blue, creating a “Hole in the Wall” This deconstruction of “feminized” work explores the difficulties in reconciling both low wages and undervalued work via social and political infrastructures, confronting issues of labor and power. The images that I myself perform, present a duality: women dressed in a black tango dance attire while engaging in de-skilled domestic chores; the surreal within non-fiction. The work underscores the intersection of everyday tasks and fantasy. The “little black dress” reflects the notion of prosperity in the US; moreover, the black dress is also transformed into a funerary symbol of luto, the Mexican tradition of wearing black for a year after a death.”

Ana Teresa Fernández is an artist whose practice explores the politics of intersectionality through time-based actions and social gestures, translated into oil and gouache paintings, installations, and videos. Operating formally at the intersection of land art, performance, and history painting, Fernandez mines 21st-century feminism, post-colonial landscapes, and the psychological barriers to empathy. Themes of border, fragility, and osmosis, which she coins as Magical Non-Fiction, are central to her practice. These ideas have significantly shaped some of her projects, such as Borranda La Frontera (2011), in which she painted the border wall between Mexico and the United States, blending it with the sky and making it seem to disappear. This performance and action, which crystallized in the permanent physical intervention and through a video and a painting series, epitomizes Fernández’s desire to address social and political subjects such as immigration rights, women’s empowerment, and border control.