Soil Horizon: A Wayfinding Practice Artist Talk with Teresita Fernández

In advance of the opening of the exhibition "Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson" at SITE SANTA FE, artist and exhibition co-curator Teresita Fernández gave an insightful talk on the material and conceptual nuances of her artistic practice.
Artist-led and conceptually driven, "Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson" is a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two artists. It is initiated by Teresita Fernández’s long-term engagement with challenging socially constructed ideas about place and landscape and by her immersive research on Robert Smithson’s art and ideas. Co-curated by Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, this exhibition critically considers entanglements between place, site, seeing, and deep time through the artists’ mutual engagement with material intelligence, geological agency, and cartographic fictions.
Throughout her work, Teresita Fernández unravels the ways human beings are impacted by the power systems that shape perceptions of place. She reimagines archipelagos, hurricanes, night skies, cave systems, underground rivers, tropical forests, shorelines, and borders to interrogate thresholds between natural phenomena and human-made devastation.
For over fifty years Smithson’s art and ideas have resonated with generations of artists and thinkers. Bringing Smithson’s historic work into direct dialogue with Fernández, an iconic artist working today, pulls the past into the present. Questioning how place, land, and landscape are defined, the exhibition asks who has agency in such spaces.
Focusing on the artists’ creative engagement with the intimate and vast scales of islands, continents, and the cosmos, "Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson" invites us to reflect on our relationship with the lands, seas, and skies that surround us. Both artists’ investigations are rooted in conceptual, research-based practices that take form through experimental sculptural approaches to matter and material. "Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson" features over thirty works by Fernández made over the last three decades, including sculptures, site-responsive installations, film, and drawings. Alongside are over thirty works by Smithson made between 1961 and 1972 that grapple with how the surface of our planet is shaped by human impacts on geological histories.
The conversation between Fernández and Smithson meanders through islands, oceans, maps, trees, roots, mirrors, and skies to reveal points of connection and departure. At SITE SANTA FE, Fernández's insistence on situating site and landscape in relation to human beings critically reexamines Smithson’s work through the urgencies of our contemporary moment.