“I wasn’t dreaming, I was opening my eyes in a story.” —4-year-old

For Patricia Fernández, days spent with her child resurface the fantasies we create in order to survive. In Three Voices, the artist presents a site-responsive sculptural work and a selection of paintings that imagine alternate worlds and systems of care inspired by conversations with her child.

Upon entering the gallery, a central door sculpture confronts the visitor directly with the multiple potentialities associated with storytelling; instead of opening the usual way, this door alternately shifts on its axis to reveal an underworld. Titled Sun Moon Place, in reference to the time and space when moon and sun are both visible, the door is a portal and space for psychic transformation. In one orientation, the door becomes a tabletop, with memory objects and symbols arranged upon it, while an assortment of bronze miniatures encased in a box-like compartment functions as a counterweight. Below the door—or under the table, a familiar place for childhood imagining and time-travel—a diagrammatic painting set into walnut wood is reminiscent of a family dining table hand-carved by Fernández’s grandfather.

In her essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin conceives of storytelling as a container—a space to accumulate, collect, nurture; similarly, Fernández’s paintings on view gather symbols, memories, and moments. In Bone Ship (Pramen) a vessel travels to drink from the ancient thermal springs of the Teplá river; Houses: Sandness and Houses: Bergen are arrangements of objects collected and created for provisional houses made with the artist’s child during their time spent together traveling. In Cocoon, Mama and Lighthouse, the traced hands of the two overlap, inviting symbolic play and possibility.

Inspired by psychologist Dora Kalff’s sandplay therapy, Fernández uses objects and symbols to represent her and her daughter’s voices, which together create a sudden constellation (three voices); psychologist James Hillman calls this a result of “the compulsive search for psychic relatedness […] a knowing together.” With Three Voices, Fernández continues to explore intergenerational dialogue and care, suggesting that to continue to exist we must reinvent our possible futures—as multiversal and rhizomatic in nature, without fixed beginning or end.