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In this conversation, Lek speaks with Fernandez about her latest solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi. The show expands on Fernandez's autobiographical exploration of housing instability, centering motel interiors, neighborhood scenes, and intimate domestic spaces drawn from her pre-teen years. Across fourteen works - many at an unusually intimate scale - earthy palettes meet subtle fantastical elements, from children gathered at motel thresholds to paper houses suspended in dreamlike landscapes. Together, the paintings and sculpture trace a psychological terrain shaped by displacement, resilience, and imagination.
Tidawhitney Lek:
How do you know me, Ronnie? When did we meet? And how has the journey been?
Veronica Fernandez:
I feel like I see you as my art sister. You and I did our first solo shows with Sow & Tailor in LA. That was your first solo in LA, right?
Tidawhitney Lek:
Correct.
Veronica Fernandez:
Yeah, so from there we started going to each other’s studios and keeping up with each other’s work. Both of our practices are very personal and have a lot of threads between them. That’s why we’re art soul sisters.
Tidawhitney Lek:
Yes, agreed. Family has been a big part of the conversations we have and what we talk about in our work.
Can you tell me a little bit about the solo show you're having with Anat Ebgi in LA? What ideas were percolating on the surface or in the back of your mind, and what was the result?
Veronica Fernandez:
Do you remember how I wrote “Prey” in oil pastel on my studio wall?
Tidawhitney Lek:
Yeah, that was cool.
Veronica Fernandez:
“Prey” came from some of the poetry I wrote—you remember, I had notes and things all over the wall. It stemmed from an idea about the neighborhood as a psychological space, the people in it, and the different situations and places their bodies have lived through.
This show centers around different spaces, but one place it orbits around is motel scenes. There are families living in motels, which is something my family went through.
Tidawhitney Lek:
What time period in your life was that?
Veronica Fernandez:
When I was a pre-teen. Some of my past work has explored the instability that comes from being evicted, being in transitional phases, and having to pack up your life and carry it with you. We moved around so much.
Thinking about those feelings now, and seeing other people go through the same thing, sparked something in me that I wanted to bring into this work.
Tidawhitney Lek:
Is this the first time you’ve talked about the motel setting in your work?
Veronica Fernandez:
I’ve included it in some paintings before. I had a piece called Paper Towns when I did Frieze LA—it had these paper houses in it, like lunch bag houses. I also had a painting called Eviction Motel.
Ideas of motels, people adapting to their environments, and that underlying theme of resilience have always been in my work. Now I’m expanding on it.
My sister and I also do nonprofit work visiting families living in motels, and that’s influenced me deeply. It feels full circle—seeing families packed into those rooms with all their belongings.
Tidawhitney Lek:
There’s a particular painting I really enjoy—Vagabond Holiday.
Veronica Fernandez:
Yeah, I love that painting.
Tidawhitney Lek:
It brought me back to when my family lived in the projects. We had two identical apartment buildings facing each other, and the staircases and guardrails framed this courtyard where all the families would gather. That painting really got me. I love it.
Tell me more about the show. How many pieces are there?
Veronica Fernandez:
There are 14 works. Some involve motels, others are interior spaces, and some are exterior neighborhood environments.
Tidawhitney Lek:
And the scale is different from what you’ve done before. Most of the work is small, and the larger pieces are fewer.
Veronica Fernandez:
Yes. When I consolidated my studio into our townhome, I remember telling you I was struggling. I used to think a 30x40 canvas was small.
Now I’m working at 8x10, and sometimes I can barely see what I’m painting. The details are so tiny I have to use the smallest brushes. Some works are larger than 8x10, but still intimate—details the size of my finger.
Tidawhitney Lek:
How rewarding was that challenge?
Veronica Fernandez:
You know I love a good challenge. Art doesn’t have to be easy. Sometimes you make it harder for yourself, and that’s what you end up conquering and learning from.
Tidawhitney Lek:
What did you learn from it? Is this the first time you’ve sketched at such an intimate scale?
Veronica Fernandez:
A lot of these paintings actually didn’t start with sketches, which is unusual for me. Normally I combine multiple sketches into one composition.
With these smaller pieces, there were rarely sketches. If I could fit my entire arm on the surface, there was probably a sketch. Some works began as large paintings that I reduced into smaller ones because I was struggling to resolve them at a bigger scale.
For example, Closer to Power sat on my wall for a year. I didn’t know how to finish it. I would work on it and then destroy it. Eventually, I forced myself to rework it as a smaller painting. Finishing it—especially the gate—was incredibly difficult.
Tidawhitney Lek:
Tell me about Some Things Don’t Stay for Tomorrow. That’s the largest piece, right?
Veronica Fernandez:
Yes. It includes the paper lunch bag houses from Paper Towns. When we were kids, we’d cut brown paper bags, make doorways in them, and build entire cities for our toys. That was our way of creating worlds. I also included them as a sculpture in the show.
In the painting, they hang from trees. They symbolize childhood innocence and adaptation—creating despite your circumstances.
At first, the painting feels quiet—Christmas lights, children making snow angels. But on one side there’s a large portal, and kids are jumping into it.
That fantasy element is central to Prey. It’s about wanting something beyond your current state. The children are literally jumping into the unknown, searching for something more.
The inspiration came from when I saw children lined up outside a motel in Sylmar, California, waiting for the school bus. It was along a highway—no houses nearby. I realized their families lived there. I wrote a poem called The Line about that moment. It mirrored my own experience as a child.
Tidawhitney Lek:
Are any of the paintings accompanied by the poems?
Veronica Fernandez:
I wrote a poem called I Want to Fly that inspired this body of work. It ends with the line, “I should have prayed for other people,” which was also the title of my last show.
It’s about someone in a room that feels like it’s collapsing. They close their eyes and try to imagine somewhere else. As a last resort, they get on their knees and pray—prey. There’s guilt in surviving, in wanting more.
Tidawhitney Lek:
How do you resolve your narratives? When do you let go and tighten them back up?
Veronica Fernandez:
Poetry and references get me started. For this body of work, I used many personal references—photographs, background objects, anatomy or expressions of family members. I also include advice from family in my poems.
I only need a few specific objects or gestures to begin. From there, the world builds.
Tidawhitney Lek:
What’s next?
Veronica Fernandez:
I’m excited to continue exploring sculpture. It feels like a new chapter. I’m excited to see where this year takes me.
Tidawhitney Lek:
Exciting.
Kayla Curtis-Evans — You were raised in Rome, and your father worked for the Vatican. How did this shape your early perceptions of religion?
Marguerite Wibaux — I definitely experienced it in excess. Mass for Easter would last three hours. Everything was bigger and more intense in a way. My mother would have to be covered in lace, wearing gloves, and showing no skin at all for the Pope Mass. So it was a certain level of ritual that was very intense. And, of course, as a child, you are much more impressionable. In Rome, there's a lot of art in the churches. That's where I discovered Caravaggio. In fact, most of the paintings are still in churches and not in museums. So you have to go to different churches to see the paintings. So for me, this idea of spirituality and something that's bigger than us is tied to the experience of looking at art, and seeing all those beautiful and extraordinary sculptures and architecture. It's a very sensorial experience. At the same time, when you're a pre-teen, that's when you start to understand that sexuality is a powerful force. I realized that in religious art, sex was everywhere. So — I wouldn't say this defines my whole practice — but it's certainly led this show. For this body of work, I really wanted to go back to the roots of that awakening.
You had an artistic awakening at the same time that you began to question the constructs of your religion. I think it's interesting that, for you, those experiences are inextricably intertwined. I feel that this body of work was also you processing your connection to religion as you've matured.
There's something about faith that doesn't make sense. For any rational person, if you start thinking about it, you're like — some of this is nonsense. The level of contradictions within religion is totally crazy. But there's also the aspect of being a part of a community. When you're a kid, everybody believes and finds it normal. And you tell yourself, 'Okay, so this is the way,' and you adopt that blind faith. I can relate that experience to art as well. The idea of me going into the arts as a full-time occupation is kind of crazy [laughs]. You know, it requires the same level of faith or belief that there's a powerful force that connects us all.
Has your faith shifted over time, now that you've grown to process those things you so willingly accepted as a kid?
So it's funny. Yes. Last Saturday, my brother got married. I was wearing my cross, and my father said, 'Oh, you're wearing your cross. But it's not one cross you need — you need a dozen to compensate for all the blasphemy you've been doing.' And at the wedding, someone else asked, 'With everything that you're doing, you're wearing this? Do you really believe in it?' I think that all faith is always very personal, and the spiritual life is very personal. I think I'm kind of doing my own thing with religion. It's still very important to me. I still believe in God. But very generally speaking, I'm very disappointed with the Catholic church and the institution, the power forces — many things are wrong there. There are a lot of parts of religion that I have trouble being part of, but at the same time, it brings me many other things. So I'm in that weird spot.
More than one thing can be true at once. With your work, you're not condemning religion altogether, but you are making your own commentary on these things that you grew up with. You're able to identify these cracks.
There's tension, you know? I think the attraction for eroticism is interesting because it's forbidden. Even the whole process of the confession is something that's voyeuristic for the priest and exhibitionist for the person confessing. The whole thing is super double-sided.
I want to talk about the feminist lens that you approach a lot of your work through. I love this perspective that you took because I feel that you're challenging or redefining women's roles as identified in the Bible. These recordings in the Bible usually position women within secondary or homemaking roles. How do you flip that on its head?
Yes, the role playbook for women in the Bible is very, very limited. There are only a few characters that stand out. Especially if you look at the New Testament. Basically, what came down into our society is the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Those are kind of the main female roles that we have available to identify with. This is a very male-gaze, male-centric kind of story. The starting point of this body of work, especially for the paintings, was that I identified that Christ is a figure that has a lot of the female experience embedded in it. It's very interesting — in Latin America in the 70s, there was this movement that was called the Theory of Liberation. It was a revisit of the figure of Christ. So the idea that he was a revolutionary, that he was fighting for the poor, that he was attacking the system. And there were a lot of left-wing revolutionary thinkers who used the Bible as a way to revolutionize South America. The idea that Christ can be revisited as many different figures stuck with me. And I think that Christ being dominated, offering his body, being betrayed, sacrificing himself — I related all of these experiences to the female experience in society. So that's why I decided to put women in the role of Christ. And also, Christ is the God of love. I think all those things go together with love and eroticism, the idea of submission, of abandoning oneself, of trust and sacrifice. All of those things are also part of the erotic experience. So that's the connection.
I think it's a very interesting through line of this body of work. Covet Thy Neighbor functions as a church stripped of doctrine. In many of the works, you reinterpret or reinvent traditional biblical depictions. If you led your own religion, what doctrine would you abide by?
[Laughs] That's a good one. If I were to be the leader of a cult, what would my speech to my believers be? I'm a firm believer in the idea of desire. Actually, before I named this exhbition Covet Thy Neighbor, the title of the show was Theology of Desire. I think desire is an energy of life. They're the same feelings. It's what makes you want to create something. It's what makes you want to connect with someone else, and maybe even have sex with someone else. An appetite for life. That would be my main tenet. I think that being scared or holding back from that is like trying to tame yourself. So that would be my main teaching — freedom to desire. I've never really said this before, but what I think that what makes sex 'dangerous' is the way it's repressed, in a way. I think that some people see sex or eroticism as animalistic notions, separated from being logical and reasonable. I feel that it's this opposition between body, animal, and human spirit that's completely wrong. I think that the way that desire and sex can connect you to something — it's a beautiful experience.
The Catholic religion can breed a lot of shame. You're taught to repress and push down those parts of yourself. Your work encourages exploring your body and your mind's connection with these notions, and I think that's really important.
It's also about love and surrendering, and letting go of yourself. I don't know how you can love if you don't engage in desire. And that's why it's weird with religion, because they preach love everywhere.
You take a multimedia approach to your work. Why do you choose to channel your artistic perspective through multiple mediums, and especially for this body of work, why did you feel that sculptures and paintings were meant to live together?
Because I wanted people to get immersed in a universe. On top of that. I'm a multimedia artist, but I'm also a multi-size artist. I go from miniatures that are about five by five inches to the six or eight-foot-long paintings. And I do those small sculptures as well as very large ones. The miniature paintings are more meditative. I paint standing, but with the miniatures, I'm sitting. It's the way I keep my balance and flow, and keep my energy moving in the studio.
It sounds like you have different parts of your brain that you tap into for these practices. So it's cool you get to feed those different parts. On the note of immersion, I think a big part of making the exhibition feel authentic was the techniques or treatments that you applied to certain sculptural pieces. You wanted to conjure this look of patina. Were there any special processes you undertook to achieve that?
There's this idea where I'm kind of attacking the ideals of religion in this show. I love plaster, and I work mostly with plaster. Most of the sculptures in the show are made of plaster, except the fountain, which is made of stone. If you've looked into my previous body of work, I used to love white plaster. And it lasts forever. It's very forgiving, so if you make a mistake, you can always repair or change it. But again, since this show was about breaking down certain ideals, I started exploring ways of soiling the plaster without applying paint on it. I started looking into different chemicals and how to make a reaction with the plaster. I rubbed them with wood wool, and then from there, sprayed them with vinegar. I realized the wood wool with the vinegar would create rust on the surface. And from there, I kind of developed this technique. I'm a very impatient person, and I want results immediately. But that's not how rust works — it takes multiple days to manifest. So to speed up that process, I started adding other elements like copper and graphite. And then ink, and then silver powder, alcohol, more vinegar, salt. I was playing chemist. It was this idea of rehumanizing the sculptures and making them very imperfect.
A lot of your paintings were about reframing Biblical scenes through a modern lens. I also wanted to touch on the fact that this was your first New York solo debut. New York is full of underground communities, and I think a lot of your paintings alluded to those spaces — like a sweaty nightclub or the back room of a dive bar. Why did you also choose to include these erotic disco themes in this body of work?
I think that it goes with the idea of transgression. The idea of going into the forbidden places. I think that those places come from my subconscious and my own fantasies. It's also about the contrast between light and shadows, from an artistic perspective.
You expressed that your faith is channeled into this work and into your practice. But now that your experience with religion has shaped you in different ways, these days, who or what do you find yourself praying to?
I pray to God as the overall force of love and connection between people. The creator of all beauty. I was recently reading a book about Michelangelo. His approach to art was about understanding, 'What is beauty?' And he says that beauty comes from seeing the creation of God within nature and the human. He says, 'Whenever I see a man, or whenever I go around in nature, I see God.' So art is my way towards spirituality through beauty. My quest for art is deeply connected to my quest for my faith and my quest for beauty, and for making something good in this world. Sometimes when I go into the zone, and I finish an artwork, I feel, 'This is not me, this is something that was channeled through me.' I want it to feel like something bigger than me.
Set within London’s The Moth Club, the film draws on the venue’s history of independent performance and its distinctly 1980s atmosphere. Styled by Tamara Rothstein in garments by Martine Rose, the visual language collapses distinctions between classical tradition and subcultural energy. Synth-driven sound and unruly choreography further blur references across ballet, rave, and punk.
A Waltz in C Sharp Minor marks the beginning of an ongoing collaboration between Christison and Tucker.
