The Brooklyn Rail

Billed as an “intergenerational conversation,” Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson at SITE Santa Fe seeks to challenge the way landscapes have been seen, depicted, and manipulated through the work of two pivotal artists. With more than thirty works each by both Fernández and Smithson, the show functions as a joint retrospective emphasizing both artists’ shared interest in place and environment.

Though there is a slight overlap in their biographical timelines—Fernández was born five years before Smithson died in a small airplane crash at the age of thirty-five—the concerns of conceptual art have evolved significantly in the decades between their respective careers.

Smithson is best known for Spiral Jetty (1970), his 1,500-foot basalt curl in the Great Salt Lake, one of the singular examples of Land Art from the twentieth century. For many like-minded artists of his generation, open land was either a blank canvas on which to impose large-scale earthworks or a source for gathering raw material that could be transported back into the context of a white-walled gallery space.

Smithson was fascinated by how representations like maps or photographs can either enhance or skew our lived experiences of a landscape. In A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968), Smithson paired an aerial photograph (cut into a triangle, then split into five sections) with five bins of an identical shape and scale on the floor, each filled with limestone gleaned from the same location. A room in the exhibit is dedicated to screening Smithson’s wonderful digressive film that documents the creation of Spiral Jetty. Within the first few minutes, viewers see torn pages of an atlas fluttering over cracked Utah soil, a representation of territory covering actual territory. The film’s final shot shows a large photograph of the completed earthwork, neatly contained and pinned to the wall of a film editing studio, as though to say that this footage of a still photograph of a sculpture in rural Utah is just as significant as standing in front of the monumental piece itself.

For Fernández, land is anything but neutral. Her understanding of land is politically and ecologically complex; it is populated not empty. In much of the work in this exhibit, she is thinking through borders, geography, the depletion of natural resources—all things that Smithson surely considered as well, even if not within today’s theoretical framework—yet for her the material tells its own parallel narrative. In multiple pieces, Fernández uses thick spreads of charcoal as a cartographic tool, as in Island Universe 2 (2023), which depicts the continents as one contiguous mass along a wall, the cardinal directions twisted to de-center supposed northern and western supremacies. When Smithson used found rocks as part of a sculpture in a late 1960s gallery setting, it was a comparatively innocent provocation about the perception of interior and exterior space. However, by shaping charcoal into a global map in the twenty-first century, one can hardly avoid thinking of the climate catastrophe and the related wildfires devastating regions across the planet.

Another material Fernández frequently uses is graphite, which provides immediate associations with pencils and drawing but which she employs as an endlessly malleable sculptural element across several pieces. Knowing that graphite is now intensively mined for the rapidly expanding lithium-ion battery industry, a new dimension is added onto work like the luminous “Nocturnal” series of carved graphite panels (2009–10), where otherwise tranquil watery scenes are hardened into an ominous dusk.

The aesthetic affinities between Fernández and Smithson are not always noticeable, yet there are many instances where visual rhymes and formal echoes carry across the generation gap. In Fernández’s sculpture Viñales (Reclining Nude) (2015), chunks of raw malachite move down a set of blackened concrete steps, the mineral’s bright green perfectly matching the colored pencil on Smithson’s Road to Crater (1969), a sketch for an unrealized walking path surrounding by banks of malachite and azurite. A back gallery is filled with work orbiting around both artists’ attraction to islands. Though Fernández’s Archipelago (Cervix) (2020), an elegant open ring of land made from charcoal, barely intersects with Smithson’s fantastically boyish Island Project (1970) drawings, which depict a series of fort-like structures on deserted islands, replete with flags and lookout towers, there is a joy in seeing both artists nurture the same idiosyncratic theme decades apart. Both artists feature mirrors in their work, both see the visual drama in a pile of sand, dirt, or graphite, both playfully deconstruct maps, and if the viewer takes in Fernández’s nearly mural-width work of fire-hued glazed ceramic, Caribbean Cosmos (Earth) (2023), there are a pair of unmistakable spiral forms at its center.