Exhibitions
Special Projects
Murals
Other works
(An Old Proposal for a New Singularity)
Acrylic on Amate paper, 28” x 28”
(We are made of those around us)
Aluminium, 29” x 24”
(What Is the Purpose of utopia?)
Acrylic on Amate paper, 52” x 40”
(From Root to Woman)
Aluminium, 21” x 13”
(We Seek Other Ways of Living)
Acrylic on Amate paper, 20” x 28”
(The Plants Speak)
Acrylic and gold leaf on Amate paper, 24.5” x 24.5”
(The Telluric People #1)
Acrylic and gold leaf on Amate paper, 19.5” x 19.5”
(We Grew up on Shared Soil)
Embossed aluminium, 21” x 13”
(The Telluric People #2)
Acrylic and gold leaf on Amate paper, 19.5” x 19.5”
(The World I Fail to See)
Acrylic on Amate paper, 19.5” x 19.5”
(Water Speaks Incessantly and Never Repeats Itself)
Aluminium, 29” x 24”
Liz Hernández & Ryan Whelan
Acrylic on wood panel and inlaid aluminium, 58” x 72”
duo presentation with Ryan Whelan
September 5 ➽ September 8, 2024
Javits Center
New York, NY
Hernández presents paintings on Amate paper, a handmade paper originating in pre-Hispanic times, and embossed aluminum reliefs portraying scenes of humans and nature in a reciprocal, communal exchange. The writings of Mixe linguist Yásnaya Aguilar, 15th-century herbal manuscripts, and William Morris’s ideas inform the utopian vision envisioned in Hernández’s imagery.
For Whelan, pattern-based paintings depicting abstracted, organic forms, at once familiar and new, pose an exploration of utopia as an open-ended notion; a shifting horizon shaping how we reimagine the alienation and flux of the now. Grounded in the ideas of William Morris, Adolf Loos, Charles Burchfield, and the Hippie Modernism movement, Whelan’s focus on surface, texture, and light opposes the smooth object, expanding compositions intended to “fill the eye and satisfy the mind,” as Morris wrote. For a group of text-based drawings by Whelan, headlines from newspapers since the late 19th century become concrete poetry that, like the forms of his paintings, leaves mystery and room for imagination.
Through their individual practices, Hernández and Whelan’s News from Nowhere recasts modernity and progress as an optimistic endeavor, connecting to nature and drawing from past philosophies, to find space for the soul.