Endurance: Jennifer Fernandez
May 2-31, 2026
Artist Talk , May 23, 3 pm
Through sculpture and video, Endurance explores a throughline from the age of exploration to the present-day colonization of Antarctica. Named after Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s sunken ship The Endurance, the show’s title highlights the resilience of the land, ice, and animals that endure despite ongoing environmental degradation in and around Antarctica today.
Jennifer Fernandez is a multidisciplinary artist based in Shoreline, Washington. Fernandez’s sculptural work has exhibited nationally. Her paintings have shown at various galleries throughout the Pacific Northwest as well as at the Frye Museum Store and are held in collection by the Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her short stories have appeared in the Penn Review, Fjords Review, and Moss, and her creative nonfiction piece "The Cuban Brown Rabbit" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of the Edwin T. Pratt Scholarship, a City of Seattle's Office of Arts & Culture grantee, a Puffin Foundation grantee, and was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center (2023). She is currently working towards her MFA at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.
Artist Talk , May 23, 3 pm
Gallery hours Fri & Sat 12-5 pm
Curatorial Statement
Collective memory, collective history—how should we communicate it? Words, “facts,” so often fail us. Perhaps before words, we turn to sensations: these cross bodies where words do not.
Fernandez speaks to us of history through texture, sound, and shadow. In this exhibition, before reading history, we have the opportunity to feel it—to hear and imagine touching the materials that would have shaped the participants’ worlds. The material here belongs to the specific history of Shackleton’s expedition; Fernandez sourced the same wood from which the boats were built; she chose wool and leather similar to what the expeditioners would have worn. She invokes shadows and sounds that would have infused their experience for years. Leather, copper, and wool evoke memories of touching these materials ourselves. Through the body, we are offered an opportunity to feel history.
And then she offers words and images. The text that accompanies this materially driven project is an essential part of the exhibition. We invite you, after viewing and hearing the physical artwork, to approach this history through the book.
But whose history? Who endured, and who was made to endure? Fernandez quietly explores identity through this story of “exploration”—a term that is itself problematic, as it connotes a dominant, original vision. She shifts our attention to the land and the animals who also underwent this story. Material and concept, animal and human, exchange places as the mode of perception.
These “explorers” came to the Antarctic driven by colonial and individualistic intentions. They remained, trapped in their ship and within their own historical framework. They could not leave the sinking vessel of their worldview. Can we?
Supported by
The Puffin Foundation and 4Culture
