| I’ve always envied men. They have power, aggressiveness and true, plain beauty. My latest body of work, “Man,” explores my internal struggles with the better of the sexes. The impetus for this work is a black and white photograph of my father at 19, and oddly enough, I look just like him. In the photograph he has a macho pose, legs apart, his hands in his pockets and set against a typical Southern California canyon landscape: he looks like a man. He is wearing army boots, a thick leather belt, jeans, a watch and a black pocket tee with thin white stripes. There was only one item of clothing missing from my wardrobe to match his in the photo. |  |
Carlee Fernandez
I’ve always envied men. They have power, aggressiveness and true, plain beauty. My latest body of work, “Man,” explores my internal struggles with the better of the sexes. The impetus for this work is a black and white photograph of my father at 19, and oddly enough, I look just like him. In the photograph he has a macho pose, legs apart, his hands in his pockets and set against a typical Southern California canyon landscape: he looks like a man. He is wearing army boots, a thick leather belt, jeans, a watch and a black pocket tee with thin white stripes. There was only one item of clothing missing from my wardrobe to match his in the photo. I didn’t have the t-shirt, so I painted my own. A friend of mine and I hiked to a similar canyon to shoot my photo. I wore the clothes, pulled my hair back and took his confident stance. I even got the desert flower in front of my right leg, just like his. However, I left one important detail untouched, his mustache. It is the only characteristic that obviously separates us in the two photographs. The diptych is titled Self Portrait: Portrait of My Father, Manuel Fernandez.
This work opened a brand new direction for my art. Previously, my material of choice was taxidermy. My attraction to taxidermy was both for its formal sculptural aspects as well as its beauty. Taxidermy is simply a hollow form hidden under a wrapper of fur. Cutting open the form, I was interested in exposing the negative space of the taxidermic animal and somehow filling it. My investigations of the animals developed into sculpture by morphing buffalo and goat heads with luggage and, later, sheep and rhinos with everyday household items such as a laundry basket and a ladder. In 2002, my work moved away from the integration of man-made objects of taxidermy into something more surreal. The “Still Lifes” series was the amalgamation of two natural objects into one new object that exudes something more natural than each on their own. In a sense, it becomes a second life, a new creation. It was as if I threw all the elements: taxidermed animals, branches, coral and fruit into a big caldron, stirred them up, and out came these sculptures. Rat with Grapes, for example, is a taxidermic rat with grapes growing in and protruding out of its body.
In 2004 and, still today, while interested in the transformation and synthesis of two natural objects, I choose to use myself as one of the two. “Bear Studies” is a photographic nude self-portrait series of myself breaking out of the form of a taxidermic bear. Wearing segments of the bearskin, some photos emulate his postures while others are more reminiscent of traditional portraiture. But all the images capture the metaphoric displacement of a bear and a human form through un-manipulated photography.
My work, series by series, has always been very linked. The new work is informed by the previous work. The bear from “Bear Studies” is now replaced by man in my newest work. Using the image of my Father as the initiator, I extended the invitation to include other influential men that have formed my life. I’ve chosen images of known artists (or images of their work that represent them), film directors, musicians and, more intimately, ex-boyfriends and even my own pet German Shepherd. The contemporary self-portraiture of my body physically next to or entwined with images of masculinity is resolved in photographs, video and sculpture. This work is my darkly confusing solution to the envy of “man.”
