ART : Illuminating the Invisible : Christina Fernandez is making her mark with photographic collages that mix cultural influences and ethereal themes

With a smile and a shrug, Christina Fernandez jokes that she is a “big llorona, “ a crybaby. She is talking about her art and trying to explain the reasons why it almost always deals with the sadness of life. But the comment is more profound than it seems because on the other side of her feigned self-deprecation is an acknowledgment of the source and strength of her work.

It helps to know that in Mexican folklore La Llorona sometimes comes as the restless ghost of La Malinche-- Cortez’s Indian lover, who weeps out of shame for having betrayed her people. Other times, she is an inconsolable mother crying over the loss of her children. Another myth has it that La Llorona wails late at night by a riverbed. Like a siren, she beckons men to their death. So the artist’s ironic self-reference at once places her work within a cultural context and hints at her attraction to mythic images.

Initially, Fernandez chose painting as her prime medium but more and more she finds herself drawn to a combination of photography and collage. She also has made a video, a six-minute silent work that attempts to capture the ethereal side of existence. Given the nature of her more recent work, it may be most appropriate to call her art puzzle pictures , the Freudian term for dream images that shock and set thought in motion.

That would make sense, too, because Fernandez says she wants to redeem her past through memory. “My work is the search for my own identity,” she says. “I want to recognize the invisible world--not only the spirit but also memory and intuition. I want to deal with the spiritual world and place it in a material, tangible context.”

Though still in her mid-20s and growing as an artist, Fernandez posseses a presence of mind beyond her years that is also evident in the sophistication of her work. For the last few years, she has been in “little shows here and there” and has shown her work in community galleries. Lately she has begun to attract more attention. In August, her work will be seen in the Otis/Parsons Art Gallery exhibition “L.A. Illuminado: Nine Los Angeles Photographers.” Then, in October, she will be part of “Chicano & Latino--Parallels and Divergence,” an exhibition at the Daniel Saxon Gallery in Los Angeles and the Kimberley Gallery in Washington.

“She portrays life as it really is,” says gallery owner Saxon, commenting on his decision to include Fernandez in a show with such established artists as Rupert Garcia and Patssi Valdez. “I was attracted to her photography because there’s a social consciousness there combined with a painterly quality.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1965, Fernandez grew up in Monterey Park. A UCLA art school graduate, she now divides her time between her Echo Park apartment/studio and grant-writing for Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Heights. She always knew she would be an artist, she says. The late Bay Area painter Robert Gonzalez was her uncle, and watching him walk what she calls the “fiery path” exposed her early on to both the demons and the angels that sit on an artist’s shoulders.

She remembers that at 4 she was already spending time on free-form coloring books and painting with watercolors. By 8, her parents had her enrolled in formal art classes. In fact, while many girls her age fantasized about being fairy princess ballerinas, she was explaining to her art teacher that she planned to be an abstract painter.

From these earliest memories of her creative life, Fernandez recalls her rebellion against the self-destructive stereotypes so often associated with the artist’s persona. She watched her uncle live out that persona and she didn’t want it for herself. “I never thought an artist should live like a Rothko or a Pollock . . . be tragic or self-indulgent in order to create. That’s a trap and I vowed to avoid it. I have always rejected preconceived notions about what an artist is supposed to be.”

It was also as a child that she began to develop her ethnic consciousness. She remembers going with family members to marches for the farm workers and to the 1970 Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles, where she watched the large anti-Vietnam War demonstration turn bloody. “I especially remember the panic of it all,” Fernandez says. “It was like I imagine war to be. We were running from the police and I wondered why. What had we done? I saw the police hitting heads with their clubs. It had a big impact on my life and I believe it politicized me.”

In creating her work, she points to several influences. One of them is the reliquary work of the French artist Christian Boltanski, whose use of photo collage made a deep impression on her. Other influences include the writer Toni Morrison, especially her novel “Beloved,” with its child-ghost and mother haunted by the memory of her infanticide. Another important presence is the late author James Baldwin for “his genius and the guts to express it.”

Fernandez first bridged the distance between the spiritual and material worlds in 1988 with a set of eight works called the “Oppression Series.” Each piece conveys coercion, subjugation and enslavement--offenses heaped upon the human spirit in small increments. These works are not about sudden assaults. They are about the gradual but inevitable annihilation or personal pride that comes with oppression.

In one, we see only a woman’s upper back. Her shoulders are streaked by the delicate straps of what must be a soft slip. Yet in the secret place between these satin borders she has been branded with a large X, knife scratches and whip slashes. On the most obvious level, of course, she is the battered woman. But Fernandez’s decision to convey the image in a negative print allows us to see the step beneath and before the accepted reality, the inner hurt. We are taken deep into her emotional damage, beyond the surface and into the psyche. More than a simple statement about wife beating. More than a visual commentary on the social bondage of women. It becomes an unblinking gaze at the memory of pain in all its grotesque permutations.

In many ways, Fernandez’s work refers to the home altars of recollection that are so popular at the moment. However, her use of the photographic process and her choice of subject matter takes this style into the realm of irony. Her work is also akin to montage, what the critic Walter Benjamin regarded as the ability “to capture the infinite, sudden, or subterranean connection of dissimilars.” By looking at her pieces, we are challenged to reconstruct the perceived image and interpret its meaning--a process that, in itself, becomes a montage. In our fragmented age, montage may be the only way to make art and, thus, the only way to understand it.

For Fernandez, style is vision and her vision is a dark one. The hues in her palette are gray tones, whites and blacks. Color is absent in her portrayal of sorrow and bleak destiny. In her 1988 “Alienation” series, Fernandez examines the near-impossibility of experiencing someone else’s pain. We are shown the agonizing estrangement that often exists between people. Her 1989 series, “Transition,” is about our simultaneously existing multiple selves. Even here, she says, connections are missed. “Our outer self is unaware of the inner self. We are unaware of our true desires and end up just biding time,” lost in the banal activities of a life hardly worth living. Our many selves may share the same space but they never meet, at least not in this world.

Fernandez says her fascination with the invisible world comes out of a belief that we live with such a pathetic lack of almost everything spiritual: “A lack of regard for God, for history, for ritual. For the things that are non-physical.” That vacuum strikes her as more pitiful than any image she can create. It also seems to her more of a delusion than the wildest fantasy she could ever conjure up visually. “I believe in myth,” she says. “I believe in the epic. I try to make those things visual because they are so visual for me.”

One of her most arresting works is called “Israel, Paradise and Me.” In this large rectangular silver gelatin print, we see the negative photo image of a dead woman wrapped in a sheet with a halo above her head. She seems to be both rising from the dead--a modern take on the Assumption of the Virgin Mary--and hovering over what lies below. In the bottom corners of the piece are two fetuses, facing one another in motionless freeze frame. A barely visible tremor of light seems to emanate from behind the woman and the embryos. This is life and death at its most basic.

It is also photography as theater. Fernandez admits that she plays the dead woman and often places herself in the work. She says that “Israel, Paradise and Me” is her comment on the role of the invisible world in the often complex emotional issues surrounding abortion. It is simultaneously her inversion of the nature of photography. Rather than try to make her images as lifelike as possible, she manipulates pictures to show what’s not there to the naked eye, but invisibly present nonetheless.

In one of her most recent works, “Peso and Pennies,” Fernandez shows a naked man desperately reaching for something across a parched desert floor. The photograph is framed by actual pesos and pennies embedded in cement. Like many of her pieces, this one captures the anxiety of life amid spectacular deprivation and uncertainty. It also points to the paradoxical desire to somehow grasp the invisibilities of life while living in a world dedicated to the ideal of material success.

She is hardly an artistic maverick for exploring such ideas. The duality of human weakness and strength, flesh and spirit, is the raw material with which artists have always sought to generate tension and challenge audiences. Almost 100 years ago, in 1912, the painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote: “Our epoch is a time of tragic collision between matter and spirit and of the downfall of the purely material world view.” He was either wrong altogether or centuries ahead of his time. Christina Fernandez seems to share his vision. Perhaps she--and we along with her--will see it come to pass.