Opening Reception: Patricia Fernandez I Points of Departure (between Spain and France)

Patricia Fernández
Points of Departure (between Spain and France)
April 14 – June 28, 2014

Opening reception: Saturday, May 17 from 6 – 9pm
Main Gallery
18th Street Art Center
1639 18th Street
Santa Monica, CA 90404

RSVP for this free event HERE! 

In Points of Departure (Between Spain and France), Patricia Fernández further develops her explorations of the geographic history that underpins generations of displacement and repression in Spain beginning with Franco’s dictatorship. Fernández investigates narratives from her land of origin through a series of walks over the Pyrenees. She presents a collection of reconstructed and found objects informed by the individual stories of Republican exiles that fled Spain during the mass exodus in 1939 and first-hand accounts of those that remained during Franco’s 36-year dictatorship. Fernández weaves together the history of the permanent exiles and Spanish Republicans that fled to France through an archive fabricated from individual exiles’ memories standing in for the missing archives taken by the State during the Vichy Regime. The material ephemera and the oral histories that construct her narrative are presented in an immersive installation, as a reconstruction of a space resembling the municipal archives of Bordeaux.

KCET Artbound: Patricia Fernández: Translations of Memory
18th Street Sizzle: Patricia Fernández (2014)

Additional Events:
Join Patricia Fernandez in the Main Gallery every Friday at 5pm for her Performative Lecture Series, April 18 – May 9, 2014.

Patricia Fernández’s Artist Lab Residency at 18th Street Arts Center and all associated events have been made possible through the generous support of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.