Spirits | Alexander Hernandez
Spirits, Alexander Hernandez (San Francisco, CA).
March 2017. Video. Found fabric, miscellaneous objects.
Hernandez’s works investigate displacement by creating sculptures and installations that migrate, occupy, and roam the museum. As a whole, the series, Guests, Spirits, Permanent Residents and Untitled, references populations that live on the fringes of society, constantly in a mode of survival.
Spirits is a collection of roaming sculptures that explore material connections between Elsewhere and the greater sociopolitical world.
Intrigued by the now-closed, local, textile mills that once sourced the museum’s fabric collection, Hernandez created larger patchwork pieces using the smallest scraps of collection. Using these not-quite quilts to shroud ghost-like refugee figures, Hernandez brought his Spirits beyond museum walls to temporarily inhabit abandoned streets and alleyways of Greensboro. The piece, like all works in the series, alludes to displacement on many scales, from the textile industry that once flourished in Greensboro to the movement of peoples across borders and geographies.
