Through portraits of both people and plants, I explore representation and display culture, ethnography, and hybridity.
My works are inspired by the mysterious symbolism of 19th and 18th century fairy tales. In recognizing the moralizing agenda within the tales, which often promote sexism and racism, I reclaim them, putting them to use in a way their collectors never intended—in order to subvert the message they were reformulated to argue.
Fairy tales were collected just as the colonizer collected the colonized, in order to expand empires. People and their stories were gathered, arranged, bastardized, sometimes rewritten, sometimes reformed, but always taken out of context.
I paint pretty pictures, but ones in which something is off. It might be a look (or a lack of), an awkward composition, a colour that doesn’t belong. It might be anything, it might be everything, or it might be nothing at all.
Stories and people were collected, once upon a time, I wish to give them agency.
Angelica Fernandes is a visual artist born in Mumbai, India practising in Toronto, Canada.