March 20 - August 3, 2025
This exhibition surveys the work of Christina Fernandez, a Los Angeles-based artist who from the late 1980s to the present has conducted a rich exploration of migration, labor, gender, and her Mexican American identity through photography. Bringing together the artist’s most important bodies of work for the first time, Fernandez’s work highlights the experiences of Mexican Americans, from border-spanning family histories to contemporary lavanderías. Fernandez also portrays the realities of being an artist, professor, and mother through series that acknowledge both the beauty and the instability of a creative life.
The exhibition’s title, Multiple Exposures, refers not only to a photographic technique but also to the artist’s revealing of that which is often hidden away, including fraught racial histories and the mistreatment of precarious communities. The exhibition evokes the artist’s self-exposure as a woman and the vulnerability of certain communities to exploitation and displacement. Whether staged or candid, Fernandez’s photographs record touch and mark making, engaging the medium’s distinct ability to convey surfaces—the surfaces of bodies, architecture, and the images themselves.
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is organized by UCR ARTS and is curated by Joanna Szupinska, Senior Curator at the California Museum of Photography. Chon Noriega, Distinguished Professor of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA, is curatorial advisor. The presentation of this exhibition at DPAM is organized by curator Ionit Behar. Exhibition design concept by HvADesign, New York. Spanish-language translations by JD Pluecker and Victor Altamirano. This exhibition was made possible by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Support for the publication was provided by AltaMed Health Services, and Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
Image credits:
Christina Fernandez, Untitled Multiple Exposures #4 (Bravo), 1999, from the series Untitled Multiple Exposures. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles.
Christina Fernandez, Lavanderia #1, 2002, from the series Lavanderia. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles.
Christina Fernandez, Lavanderia #11, 2003, from the series Lavanderia. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles.
Christina Fernandez, American Trailer, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles.