Misael Hernandez

Frontera de carácter is an exhibition that utilizes photographs, appropriated archives, and adobe building material to express my Mexican American experience. I handcraft adobe hybrid tablets with embedded prints to develop a tangible archive consisting of familial photographs, many of which I recently acquired from various family members specifically for this series, and photographs from my archive of made images. I value the modularity they allow when considering how familial photographs from Mexico can interact with personal photographs from my experiences in Northwest America. The tablets become more than history in their activation of fossil and cultural material to lay a physical and metaphorical foundation for my work as a Mexican American. Each tablet is a reminder of fleeting time and a partial pocket of history never fully explained and resurfaced through the extraction of earthly materials. 

I also utilize archival-sourced images and hand-make adobe bricks to construct cultural, religious, and landscape-centered compositions related to my Mexican heritage. Archived and personal photographs are meticulously placed onto the adobe bricks and photographed with a medium-format film camera. Including sourced historical photographs helps me establish my internal processing in a way that couldn’t be expressed within a traditional photograph. The compositions become self-portraits as reflections of myself begin to form out of the constructed monuments. The two bodies of work clash to provide an experience reflective of labor, photographic deep time, and cross-cultural shared experiences.