Priscila Fernandes www.priscilafernandes.blogspot.com

Through the process of personality fragmentation I explore concepts of identity, authorship and autobiography. I am developing these topics by creating different heteronyms or alter-egos, characters endowed with their own biographies, personalities and religious attitudes that differ from my own. They are Francisco J. and Ana Garcini. I attributed to these invented artists histories and experiences that directly influence the work they produce.

Placing myself as the ‘other’ in a singular social and intellectual background enables me to deal with complex issues of identity outside the mode of confessional autobiography.
I can be detached emotionally from the work that Garcini and Francisco produce. It’s easier to maintain a critic mind and to allow a more freely experimentation of different mediums, concepts and formats, when being disconnected from my own constrains. Moreover, engaging with this multi-identity practice allows me to have a critical distance from material that deals with fundamental facets of identity and the ‘subject’.
The construction of alter-egos, or heteronyms, it’s also a response to how systems of meaning and cultural representation multiply, arising around questions of identity and human behaviour. It’s an attempt to comprehend plurality and to understand the ‘self’ as a product of society.
The act of depersonalization involves a relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’, individual and object, inner an outer. As Sartre putted it, we must know how to say ‘we’ in order to say ‘I’.

Although Ana Garcini and Francisco J. adopt different aesthetic languages, their artwork is equally concerned in defining their own identity. Ana Garcini, for example, adopts a scientific methodology, researching on genetic identity, while Francisco deconstructs cultural ideologies, religious and superstitious identity.

Exhibitions (selection)
2007
Drosophila Melanogaster, Four Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
The Other Side of real, Cavanacor Gallery, Donegal, Ireland;
Céad in China, 411 Galleries, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing, China;
Open Systems, Green On Red, Dublin, Ireland;
Boyle Arts Festival, Roscommon, Ireland;
Aveiro Jovens Criadores 2006, Museu da Cidade, Aveiro, Portugal
2006
Launch/Making Do, The Lab, Dublin, Ireland;
it is a kind of magic, Ashford Gallery, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland;
Wildbeaming, organized by Sign Gallery, Groningen, The Netherlands;
2005
New Irish Painting, Context Galleries, Derry, Northern Ireland;
2003
Supercalifragilistichespiralidoso, Galeria Espaços Jup, Porto, Portugal;
2002
7º Prémio Fidelidade Jovens Pintores, Culturgest (Lisboa), Fundação da Juventude (Porto) e Galeria de Abrantes, Portugal;

PRISCILA FERNANDES PICTURE GALLERY