Artist Lab Alum Patricia Fernandez' exhibition at Commonwealth & Council closes this weekend! #notToBeMissed #18artist Location: 3006 W 7th St #220 Los Angeles CA 90005 Open Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 noon – 6 PM Commonwealth & Council presents Points of Departure: Five Walks by Patricia Fernández, an expanding material history of found and constructed documents that attests to the experiences of Spanish Republicans who went into exile both within and beyond the borders of Spain during the Franco regime (1939-75). http://www.commonwealthandcouncil.com/exhibitions/apr15/PF/press.html Between 2012-14, Fernández embarked on five walks across the Pyrenees mountains that separate Spain and France, retracing the mass exodus of Spanish Republicans known as La Retirada. The specific routes the artist traveled attempted to retrace those described to her in interviews by family friends and acquaintances she met in the course of her research. In re-staging these historical departures made by others, Fernández engaged with a past that persists into the present day, actively inscribing the recollections of others into her own bodily memory. Beyond these verbal remembrances of passage gathered from her interlocutors, the artist became interested in the objects that had survived their exilic crossings, as well as those material traces that did not. Along her five walks, Fernández in turn collected records of her own journeys through the mountain passes of the Pyrenees. Points of Departure: Five Walks became a means of recuperating and inscribing these personal histories of migration (including her own) through relics and documents both recovered and created by the artist into an archival installation that resists synopsis. PHOTO COURTESY OF COMMONWEALTH&COUNCIL
