box (a proposition for 10 years)

For a decade, Patricia Fernández amassed a collection of objects as part of a time-based project between her and her friend, the gallerist Young Chung. This publication by Commonwealth and Council with the support of Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) shares the contents of the artist’s letters, ceramic ware, newspaper ephemera, textiles, sculptures, drawings, paintings, mementos, and written agreement between Fernández and Chung that initiated this correspondence collection. The book, designed as an inventory, tells the story of Fernández’s prolonged period of isolation in the Mojave desert, her transition into motherhood, and Chung’s risky formation of a gallery, sharing with us an archival collection that highlights the care between one another.

Patricia Fernández is an artist born in Burgos, Spain, who lives and works between Los Angeles, Joshua Tree and Madrid.

She is an interdisciplinary artist with a research-based practice who creates material contexts to record encounters and relationships through painting, sculpture, and installation. Fernández records exchanges and timekeeping; the passing of time through birth and growth, as well as aging and decay of our own bodies and those of our loved ones. Her works emerge from an interest in history, texture and time contained within landscape. She uses personal narrative, memory, omission, and abstraction to transmit histories and build connections between people and places. Her everyday practice continues an embodiment of temporality, exploring inter-generational dialogues, care and our understandings of phenomena.

She is a recipient of the COLA-IMAP (2023), Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), Pollock Krasner Grant (2017), California Community Foundation Fellowship (2011), and France Los Angeles Exchange Grant (2012).