Soft Power: Recent Projects by Alexander Hernandez (USF)

Submitted by the Event Organizer

In Soft Power, mixed-media artist Alexander Hernandez brings together quilt and sculpture projects to explore intersectional identities and survival.

Featured projects include the Bay Area premiere of “STAYIN’ POSITIVE,” a series of textile portraits investigating the identities of Latinx and people of color living with HIV, funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission. Together, the colorful and playful “chimeras” celebrate the rich lives of these survivors. Hernandez’s “SURROGATES” includes soft human-sized sculptures locked in an embrace along with photographs in the desert terrain at the Mexico-US border. The works remind us of the isolation and dangers that migrants endure, along with the necessity to adapt, persevere, and care for each other. His sensibilities as a queer Latinx artist can be seen in his quilts and videos, which utilize pop culture references along with materials and patterns familiar in Mexican homes to evoke feelings of delight and longing.

The found materials, motifs, and colors in Hernandez’s works reflect the multi-layered references that saturate contemporary life. The artist states, “I patchwork together domestic fabrics, digitized prints, cultural textiles and pop-cultural artifacts to create Frankenstein-like work that embraces layers and patterns. In the process I challenge gender roles and acculturation anxieties through visual code switching.”

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