Heartbreaker, you got the best of me
But I just keep on coming back incessantly
Oh why, did you have to run your game on me
I should have known right from the start
You'd go and break my heart
Heartbreaker, you got the best of me
But I just keep on coming back incessantly
Oh why, did you have to run your game on me
I should have known right from the start
You'd go and break my heart
Heartbreaker, you got the best of me
But I just keep on coming back incessantly
Oh why, did you have to run your game on me
I should have known right from the start
You'd go and break my heart
Give me your love, give me your love
Give me your love, give me your love
anonymous is pleased to present the solo exhibition, To A Portrait, by Gaby Collins-Fernández.
Through recurrence and repetition, materiality and compositional unfolding, Collins-Fernández makes do with, and makes new, a world increasingly full of digital images. Exploring self-portraiture as it relates to modern-day seduction, Collins-Fernández uses the selfie to humorously and erotically profile herself in her image structure while intertwining the same work with historical imagery (the flaying of Marsyas, by Titian; hints of a Bellini Pieta; some fingers from Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto). Printed on beach towels, chiffon, and double sided sequins, Collins-Fernández’s compositions are sewn, stretched, and finally primed and painted on with oils and acrylics. Dissecting self-disclosure, Collins-Fernández thinks about eros and play; sexuality, sensuality, touches and gazes, beckoning, flirting, and confrontation. Utilizing text as subjects in reference to pop songs or idioms, from Marc Anthony, to Funkadelic, Collins-Fernández asks: Can text become a speaker, or subject? Does the image have to be the subject of the painting?
The show shares a title with a sonnet by the 16th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, A Su Retrato. It’s a poem where a 16th century intellectual, court lady, and later nun living in colonial Mexico City, rewrites two famous golden age Spanish memento mori sonnets, but dedicates it to her portrait, rather than to an idealized woman the earlier poems address (to have sex before they get old or die). Juana’s poem rewrites earlier memento mori sonnets, addressing a painted portrait of herself, and using the form of the sonnet to critique both the objectification of women’s bodies and the kind of behavior justified by aestheticization. Similarly, Collins-Fernández repeats imagery and motifs, highlighting their artifice as much as the recurring forces of desire and attention. Rather than treat aesthetic conventions as stable, she plays with the form and structure of painting, materiality, and language for pleasure, criticality, and fun.
Collins-Fernández’s work is rooted in an interdisciplinary approach to underlying patterns, deterministic rules, and dynamical systems, that are sensitive to initial conditions, but that can be thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities. However it is within the apparent randomness of her complex systems, that the underlying patterns, interconnection, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-reflection, fractals, and self-organization reveal a science of surprises - nonlinear and unpredictable, but traceable and memorable. Expect the unexpected.
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What is fascinating to me about Gaby’s work is the way it looks like it might come from a disbelief in painting, or be about undermining the history of painting. On a first encounter there is casualness to the work, maybe in relation to “bad painting,” in terms of what it looks like and how it’s put together. Once you’re engaged in looking at them though, the formal relationships become so complex it’s clear there is nothing casual about Gaby’s paintings.
Born and raised in Inwood, NYC, Gaby Collins-Fernandez’s pitch perfect ear is tuned to the sound of competing symphonies. Playdates getting lost at The Met, skyscrapers and underground tunnels, her family, the intimacy of her neighborhood, and the broader Latin American diaspora fold and unfold into images that present a world both rich and layered, random and incomprehensible. Humor, tragedy, biting wit, and bleeding heart are pieced together from the vast reaches of her imagination, crystallizing into works that are at once autobiographical and socially poignant.
Gaby Collins-Fernandez received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art. Her work has been shown in the U.S. and internationally, including at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama and El Museo del Barrio, New York. She is a recipient of residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York, and The Marble House Project, Dorset, Vermont; and a 2013 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award. She is the Co-Founder and co-Editor of Precog, an independent magazine that explores science, technology, techno plastics, cyber culture, and feminism.
