Misael Hernandez
Springfield, Oregon
I utilize black and white archival photographs and personal color photographs, together with handmade adobe bricks, to construct cultural, religious, and landscape-centered compositions related to my Mexican heritage. These compositions are carefully staged and photographed using a medium-format film camera. The meticulously crafted sets unify symbolism, photographic deep time, and shared experience across a single print. The constructed compositions serve as both physical and metaphorical monuments, relating to the geography that I and others have traversed in laying the foundation for Mexican Americans. Including sourced historical photographs helps me establish a layer of internal processing in a way that traditional photographs cannot achieve. The compositions become self-portraits as reflections of myself begin to emerge from the constructed monuments.
Ultimately, my work exists as an act of preservation, not of a fixed past, but of a living, evolving experience of self shaped by cross cultures, memory, geology, and time. It reflects a desire to understand and protect intimate and wide-scale histories and the materials and mediums in which associated experiences can unfold.
