Misael Hernandez
Misael Hernandez is a photographer from Springfield, Oregon, and a recent MFA graduate and graduate instructor from the University at Buffalo (2023-2025). His work utilizes documentary and archive to decipher the culture, religion, and identity of his Mexican heritage and Northwestern American upbringing. These two cultures and the landscapes of the West have had tremendous impacts on his character and artistic practice. He now combines adobe brick material, sculpture, and historically sourced images to construct photographic works that refer to his sense of identity and its relation to a deep photographic time and cross-cultural shared experiences. Hernandez will utilize his awarded film to continue the development of his project Frontera de carácter (Character Frontier) by exploring the potential of larger adobe monuments (head height) in outdoor and indoor settings. He will also further develop his print-embedded adobe tablets with newly made photographs and expand upon the fossilization aspect of his work by exploring a survey approach to his traversed landscapes and including extracted material from the photographed sites. Hernandez’s work ultimately 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 histories can unfold.
