“The first thing I do when I start a new work is I ask this very simple question, ‘Where am I?’ I take that question very seriously,” says the artist Teresita Fernández. In the exhibition “Maelstrom,” Fernández uses her sense of place—in this instance the islands of the Caribbean—as a metaphor. In the Americas, the Caribbean islands were the first point of colonial contact, and in these ravishing tiled and burned works, forces of aggression and disruption are envisioned as elemental. Such power could be sweeping across land masses, or raging in the mind. —L.J.