Joel Hernandez, standing in his bright Mission District studio, ruminated on the apocalyptic day in 2020 when wildfire smoke and smog blocked the sun. “Remember that day in San Francisco when the sky was pink?”
“I’m looking out the window, and it’s just the most beautiful pink sky I have ever seen — and there was a rainbow that was going across it, too,” he said. “But underneath it all, I couldn’t feel more underwater.”
Hernandez felt a mix of emotions that day, witnessing a “cotton candy rainbow, Lisa Frank moment” while grappling with his friend’s cancer diagnosis, the destructive fires and the pandemic lockdown. It has become a sentiment he explores regularly in his sculpture and papier-mâché art.
Duality is a recurring theme in Hernandez’s life and features heavily in his solo exhibition, “At Least We’re Damned Together,” coming to the Tenderloin on Saturday.
Watching everything from immigration raids to an AI takeover this past year, Hernandez said his artwork has darkened from the “cute” show he planned to create.
In one piece, “Silver Lining,” a brightly colored rainbow with a glittering silver lining arches over a glistening body of water. A man’s face emerges from — or submerges into — the blue.
In another, a rendering of Gooble, the lovable ghost cartoon from the children’s TV show “Yo Gabba Gabba!” opens his mouth to reveal a man’s grimacing, red-eyed face behind the mask.
Each mask, he said, represents a moment — whether his own or others’. Afterwards, he can let it go.
“It’s like I’m shedding it from myself,” he clarified. “It’s not to conceal.”
Hernandez also hopes to break past the binary, or any box the world might place him in. In another sculpture, the grinning visage of a piñata is torn open and a distressed, crying man’s face peers through.
“Sometimes as an artist, I feel like I’m only contacted when there’s a gay show coming up,” he said. Gallery owners will call him: ‘“Hey, it’s Pride. You’re gay. You want to do a show?’ or, ‘Hey, it’s November, we’re gonna do something for Hispanic Heritage Month,’” Hernandez said.
“I’m not a fashionable object for the month. I am a working, living artist, that’s year-round. I’m also gay and Hispanic in April.” (This show just happens to fall in Pride month.)
Hernandez grew up in a Mexican border town and moved to the United States as a child. His art has consumed much of his life, so his life comes out in his work: Mexican motifs and color schemes appear in most of his sculptures, references to the discrimination he still faces as a gay man.
In a two-part sculpture, a shrouded golden figure — the “tech overlord” — holds the earth in their hand. By contrast, the tiny faces of “the working class” peer through the cracks of the fissuring pedestal upon which the figure stands.
For Hernandez, it raises the question: “Who do you praise?”
“I’m completely surrounded by AI right now,” he said, gesturing at the city outside his windows and contemplating the dozens of masks and sculptures from this and past shows that fill his studio walls. (On the couch, his dog snoozed with its face pressed up against a calavera-style mask three times its size.)
In the middle of near-trillion-dollar tech valuations and hundreds of millions of dollars in AI money flooding the city, “It just feels so weird to be sitting here making little papier-mâché, like, one strip at a time.”
In his rare time not creating, he likes to take long walks and soak in the city he has called home for nearly a decade. If it’s not seven miles, he says, it’s not a walk.
The strolls remind him: “I’m just this little ant,” he said, smiling distantly.
While the collection is “overwhelmed with feelings,” Hernandez said it’s all open to interpretation. For his part, he tries to “find silver linings in everything” and offer “a reminder of love.”
“I really wanted to tell a story of just people having this moment of: ‘Shit, everything around us is feeling a little bit hectic, but at least we got each other,’” he said. “The house may be on fire, but at least I’m holding onto you.”
The “namesake” for the show is just that. Two men cling to each other, naked, eyes closed. It doesn’t matter that they’re in the belly of a snake.
Joel Hernandez-Millen’s exhibit “At Least We’re Damned Together” opens on June 6 at Moth Belly gallery, at 912 Larkin St.
