Alexander Hernandez
Light as a Feather, 2022
Seven Minutes in Heaven, 2022
Found sleeping bag, spray paint, fabric remnants, embroidery floss
Alexander Hernandez’s soft sculptural installations are playful representations of intimacy and sensuality. Limbs jut out from under coverlets, a suggestion that these differentiated arms and legs belong to spooning bodies, safe from the audience’s gaze. Hernandez’s choice to use domestic stuff–sleeping bags, clothes, and bedding printed with cartoon characters and colorful designs—invests the forms with child-like innocence. The spray paint that he applies is to these materials is decorative tagging tactic that’s in line with his sourcing strategies: no-cost trash picking and low-cost thrifting. What’s cast away is an aspect of urban decay, some of it sun bleached and otherwise transformed by San Francisco Bay Area weather conditions. Hernandez’s practices is inspired by these socio-economic and environmental processes.
Born in Huajuapan de Leon Oaxaca, Mexico, and raised in Grand Junction, Colorado, Hernandez earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing at Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in Denver in 2007. He traveled to San Francisco to study for an Master’s of Fine Arts degree at California College of the Arts in 2010. Right before starting graduate school, he received a HIV+ diagnosis. Despite Bay Area living costs, he recognized that its health care services and queer and Latinx cultural communities offered good reasons to relocate. Hernandez completed his MFA in 2012, and has stayed on in the city that he wonders loves him as much as he loves it. An educator and activist, he teaches at Larkin Street Youth Services and lives in San Francisco’s Sunset District.
Photos courtesy of Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
Based in San Francisco, artist Alexander Hernandez, was originally born in Huajuapan de Leon Oaxaca, Mexico, and raised in Grand Junction, Colorado. His practice is mixed-media in nature with a concentration in textiles. His work explores the intersectional identities of the immigrant experience, queer sensibilities, gender expectations, and HIV+ survival. In 2007 he earned his BFA in Painting and Drawing from Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design in Denver, CO and his MFA in Studio Art in 2012 from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He has participated in a variety of art residencies including Mass Moca in North Adams, MA; SJ Museum of Quilts and Textiles, San Jose, CA; Root Division in San Francisco; Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC; Mark Rothko Art Center in Latvia; the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; ACME in Steuben, Wisconsin; and recently finished a residency at the New Museum Los Gatos, Los Gatos, CA.
