'Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape'

'Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape'

Blanton Museum of Art, through Jan. 3

MLK & Congress, 471-7324, www.blantonmuseum.org

Perhaps because we can't see it in its common state, streaming through the air, we don't tend to think of light as one of the more valuable implements in a visual artist's toolkit. But when you look at Teresita Fernández's art, well, it's all about the light.

As is evident in the solo exhibition "Blind Landscape," many of the other materials that the artist employs – graphite, polished steel, aluminum, glass beads – are meant to catch the light and play off it, to glint or glimmer as you pass by, to draw your attention with that flash of radiance, to suggest that in some unlikely way, a fixed and solid object is fluid, capable of motion. Glance down into the floor-mounted circle of Eruption, with its miniscule glass beads of orange, yellow, red, and violet, and the colors appear to shift, as if this were indeed a pool of lava you're peering into, its thick, volcanic callaloo an angry swirl. Move past Projection Screen, with its onyx beads loosely organized into a rectangle on the wall, and the pinprick reflections that follow you in a lazy arc over the surface of the beads work with their arrangement and the negative space between them to create a buzzing field of atoms, constantly vibrating and jostling themselves into new patterns. Reproduce these works in flat, dull hues, remove the source of illumination, and they would likely be static. Light is the invisible conspirator behind their animation, the intangible catalyst that brings Fernández's work to life. It's what causes the 14,000 graphite pebbles of Epic, set high along one wall of the gallery, to sparkle as you stroll from one end to the other, transforming it from an interior installation of unliving stone to a galaxy of dark stars against a bright sky – the Milky Way in negative. It's what makes the irregular, foliagelike cut metal of Portrait (Blind Landscape), Portrait (Blind Water), and Vertigo (Sotto in su) look like parts of trees lightly stirred by a breeze, the gaps between leaves opening and closing, the shadows stretching and shrinking.

Of course, light isn't the only agent responsible for this illusion of motion. There is the thing that's actually moving around these works: you, the viewer. But as we tend not to think of light as a tool of the artist, we tend not to think of ourselves as part of the artist's toolkit. And yet we are. It's our movement toward, past, and away from this art that allows the light to play off these reflective surfaces the way it does. We are as integral to the effects that Fernández is after as graphite or glass. And she happily reminds us of that repeatedly in this show. The layers of steel in Vertigo (Sotto in su) extend from a wall horizontally just above most people's heads, creating a small arbor that you're simply drawn to step under. And when you do and you look up (as you're bound to do), you see yourself hanging in the "tree" above you, the polished metal as reflective as the surface of a pool. With Ink Mirror (Landscape), the artist is considerably more straightforward about it; you stare at the long, tall slab of black fiberglass set in a snowbank of marble dust for any length of time, and you wind up staring at yourself.

It can be a bit startling and even disconcerting to catch your reflection in a work of art, but it's useful. We can all stand to be reminded that where art is concerned – and by that, I mean any creative endeavor – our role is not just to be a consumer, ingesting what someone else has produced; we're completing a circle that began with the creative spark within the artist's mind, closing a circuit that, just like an electrical connection, creates a charge. Like the light that plays across the works in "Blind Landscape" – and in Stacked Waters, Fernández's marvelous installation of liquid blue and white tiles that fills the Blanton Museum's atrium – we activate the art. It's something to ponder as you regard Epic's epic gray constellation or go swimming in the atrium's liquid expanse.