My background in scenic painting has drawn me to the stage and its many layers of reality. The curtain represents a boundary between the box below: the spectator and active space. However, without actors, this boundary creates a minimal and transitional zone with the potential to explore multiple narratives. I am drawn to passages, doorways, and paintings within paintings. These motifs become places I am yearning to go but can never enter into. I have the feeling if I walk into this space, there will be another one behind it, creating a never-ending cycle.

My work is an act of synthesizing memory, family history, and place. The collaged nature of my paintings speaks to this synthesis and serves to mimic the convoluted nature of memory and blurriness of familial narratives. Many objects incorporated throughout my paintings are seemingly arbitrary but hold weight in my memory for their feeling of permanence.

Peñafiel’s works unravel the grim tapestry of our world, a chaotic realm entrenched in the cyclical grip of history and politics. His immersive installations serve as a raw mirror reflecting the relentless struggles faced by the marginalized and downtrodden, revealing the insidious workings of prevailing power structures.

My oil paintings encompass a wide range of subject matters and styles. However, if there is one thread that pulls my work together it is the idea of responding to, and expressing emotions and experiences, through painting. I am influenced by what I see in my everyday life. Mundane events, media, human desire, motivation, apathy, and helplessness are just some of the interconnected reasons to paint. The banality of the images depicted—sometimes in bright, saturated colors and other times faded and pale—become surrogate self-portraits, memories, and hopeful futures.

I’m interested in painting and color as a way to explore interior spaces and intimate moments that are often overlooked—paying attention to what is happening when “nothing” is happening—specifically through the nuance and beauty of shadows during ordinary scenes. Shadows have reminded me that these spaces are not static; they're constantly shifting, blending, shrinking, and elongating our surroundings and ourselves, causing our shapes to mingle and hues to change even if we don't intend for them to.

Being mainly a figurative artist, I seek to capture intimate settings to use as a gateway for exploring the human experience. A comprehensive catalog of unique experiences is veiled behind every silent gaze of the human expression. My work is influenced by the genre of magical realism, which gives a prominent place for addressing concepts via emotion, mood, and imaginative means. I refer to my work specifically as “non-urban art,” though I neither consider it rural art, nor is it specifically about rural life.

My work explores my own hybridized body, examining the way society defines, categorizes, and assigns power to it. I am a southerner, a Chinese American, and an immigrant. All these identifiers often clash with one another, creating an internalized hierarchy that leads to a precarious sense of self. These drawings investigate how food and other cultural phenomena are a site of collision for these identities. More precisely, the work investigates how these objects and events are a vehicle for both assimilation and alienation in the South.

Gonzalo Hernandez’s multi-faceted art practice addresses personal narratives related to contemporary dilemmas such as labor, success and failure, the art world, and identity. Culling from autobiographical circumstances, his installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and film are highly particular to his perspective as an immigrant, while also addressing broader cultural associations. Eliminating the distinction between art and life, the artist considers many situations and materials as viable for inclusion in his work, no matter how banal or quotidian.

These paintings use nostalgia to soothe and to question. I have a deep longing for the perceived innocence of the past, especially when reality may feel corrupt and chaotic. Living in the past—or at least in my studio—can feel like a vacation from the present, no matter how problematic the preceding decades.

My artistic practice requires me to delve deeper into the layers of my belief systems and interrogate assumptions in order to understand how my perception of reality influences my work. I am interested in learning about different philosophies that investigate the nature of human experience and our common bonds—for example, Carl Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious, Joseph Campbell’s ideas of the Monomyth, and Taoism’s embrace of reality as an indivisible totality.