Opening Friday, September 18, 2015, this multi-year research program is one of the most ambitious undertakings to date for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit/MOCAD. Detroit City is comprised of three concurrent series: Detroit Affinities (exhibition), Detroit Speaks (education), and Detroit Stages (performance). The show remains on view through January 3, 2016.
Detroit Affinities: Jonathan Hernández
Begun over a decade ago, “Vulnerabilia” is built upon the fascination of Jonathan Hernández with our media-saturated present. The title of the series evokes the idea of vulnerability while referencing the delicacy of the original materials that artist Hernández uses as well as the form and fragility of life.
Cut directly from the daily news, the thin membrane of the paper and the sensitivity of the ink make these images contrarily permanent, frozen in time, and ephemeral. Beyond the paper itself, Hernández’s choreographies of images also gesture toward our shared humanity. Obsessively cataloguing and arranging these images, Hernández creates a kind of visual encyclopedia of various moments—both catastrophic and rather ordinary—that define contemporary human life.
“For his first solo exhibition in a U.S. museum Hernández’s has further developed his uncanny appropriation of mundane images that has characterized his work for many years. He is a master of transforming the everyday into unruly tapestries of uncertainty, ambiguity, and undomesticated chaos,” says Jens Hoffmann, senior curator at large for MOCAD.
The collages presented at MOCAD include both pre-existing works from the series as well as new compositions that Hernández has made for the exhibition related to the city of Detroit. Architectures abandoned and left; the faces of dozens of politicians peering furtively at their watches; car crashes and small-scale catastrophes. Hernández’s appropriation of these mundane images transforms them with great unease into a tapestry of uncertainty, ambiguity, and intrigue.
For more details, call the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit at 313.832.6622 or http://mocadetroit.org.