Esther Hernandez: A Playful Approach
By Madeleine Boyson
Portrait Parody, image credit Scott Russell.
There isn’t just one way to quantify artist and curator Esther Hernandez. The Denver-based arts professional has a résumé as layered as her practice, which partially accounts for her designation as a “multidisciplinary artist.” While this term can elicit the vague supposition that an artist can’t settle down with one medium, for Hernandez it’s a playful and holistic view of art as an aggregate that begs to be explored. She applies various media to this evolving inquiry—digital and stop motion animation, performance art, kinetics and automatons, interactive and interdisciplinary installations, molds, sculpture, video, and music—all while probing the shape of our humanness in new and absurd ways.
Hernandez is a former-farmer-turned-self-taught-artist. Over the last decade, she’s been a resident at RedLine Contemporary Art Center and PlatteForum, a featured artist in Denver Art Museum’s Untitled series, and one of Arthyve’s Archives as Muse inaugural creatives. Hernandez has also translated her creative expertise into mentorship as the former Associate Director at PlatteForum, and now in the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Failure Lab and Creator’s Studio programs, and the Rough Gems program at Union Hall, where she works as Chief Curator.
This month, Hernandez brings her multidisciplinary approach to Saul Acevedo Gomez’s two-dimensional drawings and Kate Stone’s animations in a dual exhibition later this month at Union Hall, titled Living Rooms. The show (as in Hernandez’s own creative practice) contemplates how disparate media can energize the stories that are invisibly woven into our surroundings.
With Living Rooms in mind, I interviewed Hernandez about her creative practices—artmaking and curation—to better understand how these disciplines inform or expand on each other. I’ve included some of her responses below, which illustrate how her thoughtful playfulness helps viewers explore known and unknown worlds.*
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Still from Six Eye Pop, animation, Image courtesy of the artist.
What is your driving ethos as an artist? What is your "why" for making art?
EH: I feel like I have a deep inner need to explore the way things work, to continuously learn and process life in a playful way… There is this overlap that happens with artwork and the general internal processing of life, where they become intertwined and synchronistic, even if it isn’t apparent at first. I always loved this [Waldorf school founder] Rudolf Steiner quote that I feel sums up my practice: "We are fully human only while playing, and we play only when we are human in the truest sense of the word.” So I guess making art makes me feel human.
MB: Playfulness in art and life intersect throughout Hernandez’s work. Vehicle for Inner Exploration (2018), for example, features luminescent plants, soundscapes, and a fog machine in a donated car, but installation coincided with an Ayahuasca ceremony that the artist says showed her “a doorway into a whole…new world” that was actually herself. Similarly, the recent double zoetrope installation Soil As Soul (2023) draws on Hernandez’s agricultural background, generating parallels between our souls and our soils and the effects we have on—and as part of—our environment.
What does being a “multidisciplinary artist” mean to you?
EH: I used to think that being a multidisciplinary artist meant that I was bored easily and hated doing the same thing over and over, but that's not true! Being a multidisciplinary artist has helped me realize where my core interest becomes alive and in some ways it is by doing the same thing over and over but in different forms. It takes longer to figure it out… [but by] allowing myself the unrestricted freedom to explore different mediums, I have found that they do intersect and that I do need all the skills to get where I’m going… I am still trying to get to the bottom of it all, but I think my underlying interest is quite simply to mimic what it means to be “animate” and that work does require a multidisciplinary approach.
MB: Tracking the artist’s work back in time, viewers can see how Hernandez revisits familiar concepts through new materials and methodologies. The disarray of Acausal (2021-2022), funkiness of Vehicle for Inner Exploration (2018), and surrealism in This Must Be the Place (2017) and all consider aspects of ourselves from the generative realm of the room—a neglected living space, a car interior, and a fantastical indoor garden respectively.
The disarray of Acausal, courtesy of the artist
How do rooms create the necessary parameters to tease out your artistic practice? How does your artistic practice develop or metamorphose when you create within a specific set of physical or metaphorical boundaries?
EH: Well, it is a sort of container and there are so many ways to present that container and play with metaphors depending on the concept. Houses and spaces can also be representative of the self. The spaces we live and work in also live and work in us, in our subconscious, showing up in dreams, for instance.
MB: Hernandez is also interested in the discord between these rooms, as the upcoming exhibition at Union Hall brings to the fore. What is public and what is private? How do we conceptualize what’s real and what’s hidden when imagination and physical space collide?
Walk me through Living Rooms. Where did this exhibition originate and how has it developed over time?
EH: I had been a fan of Kate Stone’s work for years and knew I wanted to feature her at some point. After doing a studio visit with Saul, I started to think about the way…both used different spaces in their artwork as a backdrop for an imaginative, surreal scene to unfold… I loved how they both used the known and familiar (space or room) as a base to explore the unknown and mysterious. The dual consciousness and tension between the known and the unknown…the familiar and the mysterious is traversed in both artists’ work. The name Living Rooms also suggests this dual consciousness—a living room is a general living area and/or a space that is alive with its own consciousness. The exhibition idea naturally unfolded after talking with both artists and making the connections in their work… I love the differences in Saul and Kate’s work: for example, the conversation between the use of domestic space and commercial space… The bringing together of…contrasting elements can paint a whole picture, which is satisfying to play with.
Headwaters, Kate Stone, Image courtesy of Esther Hernandez
MB: For Hernandez, curation and artmaking complement each other but draw from distinctive needs. She describes her curatorial journey as “unconventional,” beginning with hybrid “orchestrations” inspired by the Situationists, a 1960s movement for breaking down divisions between cultural production and regular life. Now she sees these disciplines as more discrete, even if they clarify and nurture each other. Greater institutional knowledge “fosters empathy and support” throughout the exhibition process, and Hernandez furthers these goals by using curation to mentor young and underrepresented creatives, like in Union Hall’s Rough Gems program.
I Was Loosing the Uncivilized Within Me, Saul Acevedo Gomez, image courtesy of Esther Hernandez
How do you approach curation? What is your driving ethos as a curator and is it the same as or different than being an artist?
EH: As an artist I try to make things that I want to see in the world, things that light me up. As a curator I try to do the same while also thinking about diversity, equity, and inclusion; what is happening in the world around me; and what is relevant to our community and artists’ needs. I feel a responsibility as a curator to support and advocate for artists, especially the emerging ones and those who have had fewer opportunities… Being an artist myself helps me to relate to the professional struggles and burdens of the path. I love working with my peers and having the opportunity to showcase their talent and hard work.
I am drawn to experimental, contemporary work that is inclined to explore the many topics of modern absurdities, existential crises, spiritual inquiry or the search for truth and self. I believe many people can connect with these themes, and I hope to foster public engagement with art that is accessible and unpretentious. My emphasis is mostly on local talent but once or twice a year I am able to bring in an international artist.
MB: Hernandez’s work (in every iteration) feels both comforting and off-kilter, connecting patterns and viewpoints that otherwise might feel discrete. Playfully destabilizing social norms creates space for productive connection and conversation, even when her work prompts unusual coincidences. And that is the value of an artist and curator tuned into the delicate threads between artists, media, and disciplines, as Hernandez continuously proves herself to be.
MB: What do you hope viewers absorb or take away from art that aims to “redefine both” abstract elements and everyday motifs, as in Living Rooms?
EH: For me, it really is about acknowledging the absurdities of reality and everyday life—the multidimensionality of it and the layers that exist within it. I enjoy a playful approach because it makes the world feel somehow less devastating and easier to be in, which ultimately is a healing feeling. I hope viewers can find some resonance with the works in how they perceive or experience their inner world and/or outer world or perhaps get a laugh out of it, form a new curiosity, or just enjoy the beauty and mystery of it.
Instagram: @Esther.hz
Madeleine Boyson (she/her) is a Denver-based writer, poet, and artist. She holds a BA in Art History and History from the University of Denver and makes her living as a communications and editorial coordinator, creative director, and arts writer.