West Austin Studio Tour | Ana Fernandez: Real Estates and Other Fictions

As a special event during the Saturday and Sunday afternoons of the West Austin Studio Tour, Ana Fernandez will be hosting her “Botanica Stop N Go” in the gallery. Normally operated out of her “Chili Queens” food truck in downtown San Antonio, the artist will prescribe you an aromatic cure for something that troubles you.  Have you been ‘blocked’ on Facebook? “Botanica Stop N Go” has incense for that. Need to “stop doing that”?  Show and tell the artist and she will fix you up with a healing potion.

In her solo exhibition of oil paintings, “Real Estates and Other Fictions” Ana Fernandez paints from her own on-site photographs of the tradition-laden Mexican American community where she currently lives and works. Like Edward Hopper’s landscapes of Depression-era America, her brooding realism isolates her subjects in a specific time and place. However, her creative process is more in line with magic realist writing; twilight skies, set-like driveways, and surreal manipulations of exterior home decor lace cryptic narrative into the frontal, deadpan symmetry of her vignettes.

Ana Fernandez (b. 1971, Corpus Christi, Texas) presents recent paintings and works on paper in the largest exhibition of her work to date. Upon returning to San Antonio after earning an MFA at the University of California at Los Angeles, Fernandez made her neighborhood the subject of these latest works.

-Edward R. Hayes Jr., Curatorial Advisor & Curatorial Assistant at the McNay Art Museum.