Cybernetics & Human Knowing

This issue’s featured artist is Brazilian artist and educator Fernanda Mendes, who holds a Ph.D. in French Literature. Connecting her research on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (French: À la recherche du temps perdu) to her artistic practice, Mendes uses language to promote a complex and lyric dialog between text and image.
Working with found and raw materials such as paper scraps, threads, fabrics, clay, latex, plaster; Mendes explores the materials organic and fragmented qualities to create textural two- and three-dimensional forms. Her artwork calls our visual and tactile senses by attempting to organize materials that can’t always be organized as form. Playing with these sonances and dissonances, Mendes reminds us how form insists on existing and how materials and form construct a language of remains and fragments.
Mendes has exhibited in important venues in São Paulo, Brazil such as Centro Cultural São Paulo, Museum of Art of São Paulo and Pavilhão da Bienal São Paulo. Parallel to making art, Mendes teaches French and Portuguese to non-native speakers in Brazil.