InterviewTeresita Fernández peels back erased histories of landscape

Artist Teresita Fernández poses in her studio in Brooklyn, New York City. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London

For artist Teresita Fernández, a landscape is never just a benign stage of rock and soil. It’s a charged site, layered with history, politics and fraught cultural assumptions.

“The land, the ocean, the water — these are never really neutral places. Even though we may think of a landscape or a seascape as this beautiful, free image, it’s always loaded with histories that are not just invisible but deliberately erased,” she told The Korea Times in an interview coinciding with “Liquid Horizon,” her new solo show at Lehmann Maupin Seoul.

“So when I’m looking at a place, I tend to think about how this place lives in our imagination and what’s being left out, what isn’t being told — geographically, racially, economically.”

Teresita Fernández's "Nocturnal(Milk Sky) 1" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London

In some of her installations, Fernández works with gold and pyrite, the shiny yellow mineral long nicknamed “fool’s gold,” to conjure scenes that shimmer with deceptive serenity. Yet beneath that gleam lies her meditation on how the Americas were violently remade through westward expansion and colonization, all in pursuit of these radiant materials.

The artist has also shown how modern maps reinforce our inherited biases: the privileging of north over south, center over periphery, first world over third.

“Maps have long been a tool of colonialism that distorts your perception of reality. Things are not really the size you see in relation to one another. The Mercator projection we’re all familiar with, for example, allowed a story to be told about dominant centers and peripheries based on the perspective of who was designing the map,” she noted.

Fernández’s own cartographies imagine the world otherwise. In “Island Universe,” the seven continents unfurl across the wall in a topsy-turvy horizontal chain, as if the globe had been peeled open like an orange. And in “Archipelago(Cervix),” more than 700 Caribbean islands are reconfigured into the shape of a cervix, invoking the history of colonial violence against the region’s women.

The effect is disorienting. Viewers are forced to unlearn the familiar cardinal cues, and with them the cultural hierarchies they uphold.

“They have to change their frame of mind in order to really see it,” she said.

Installation view of Teresita Fernández's solo exhibition, "Liquid Horizon," at Lehmann Maupin Seoul / Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London

In Seoul, Fernández showcases this vision through what she calls “stacked landscapes.” Instead of literal geographies, the titular “Liquid Horizon” offers a series of sculptural abstractions in charcoal and sand — materials that bear their own geological weight and memory.

“The stacking isn’t just about the horizontal lines,” she said. “It’s also about this idea that the more you dig, the more you peel back what you think you’re seeing, the more you find the historical and cultural context of place and of materials.”

Her abstract seascapes, such as “Nocturnal(Milk Sky),” conceal stories of migration, both voluntary and forced, throughout human history. And in “White Phosphorous/Cobalt,” nearly 3,000 glazed ceramic cubes evoke two substances: white phosphorus, manufactured and weaponized in modern warfare, and cobalt, extracted under brutal conditions in Central Africa.

Teresita Fernández's "White Phosphorous/Cobalt" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London

A detailed view of Teresita Fernández's "Liquid Horizon 4" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London

Still, Fernández insists that the aesthetic and emotional power of her textured landscapes matters as much as their embedded histories.

“In the end, I’m not making posters or slogans with political content. I’m an artist creating experiences. I’m very interested in the quiet, subjective experiences of a viewer looking at something and trying to understand it,” she noted.

“I think of it as a prepolitical state — before you externalize, before you put things in the world as an opinion or a declaration, it exists in your psyche as something that’s forming.”

“Liquid Horizon” runs through Oct. 25 at Lehmann Maupin Seoul.