ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores how queer, trans, and diasporic individuals—including myself—resist alienation through self-reinvention. In Transgressing Alienation, I collaborate with LGBTQIA+ subjects (and turn the lens on myself in works like Maria’s Divine Intervention) to document how vibrant self-styling and performance become acts of defiance. Through photography, I capture the radical potential of transformation, drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s “world-making” to show how we create spaces of belonging despite exclusion. As a non-binary mixed-race Dominican immigrant, my practice interrogates the violence of categorization while celebrating the fluidity of identity. My self-portraits, like Maria’s Divine Intervention, reclaim religious and cultural iconography to frame my body as sacred—a site of both struggle and transcendence. The images, printed on unframed aluminum, reject containment, just as their subjects reject rigid social boundaries. This project extends beyond the gallery through community workshops, where participants co-create visual narratives of survival and joy. In an era of escalating anti-trans violence and colonial erasure, I use photography not just to document but to intervene—to insist on our right to opacity, beauty, and self-determination.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Carlos Hernandez (They/He) (b. 2001, La Vega, Dom. Rep.) is a queer mixed-race Dominican immigrant, curator, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. They use their research-based practice across disciplines to turn to the ways that performance, curation, and writing can open up space to disidentify from the ways that oppressive systems and structures alienate LGBTQ+ communities of color. Through their work they archive the ways that members of their communities disrupt normativities forced upon us, through moments that focus on our modes of survival during a time where our humanity is constantly being stripped away from us. They have exhibited their work across the US at institutions Sotheby’s Institute of Art, new York, NY, YoungArts Gallery, Miami, FL, and Montclair Museum of Art, Montclair, NJ, among others. He holds a BFA from NYU Tisch in Photography & Imaging and Social & Cultural Analysis and was awarded the 2023 NYU Latinx Studies Award, and was previously named a 2021 Benjamin A. Gilman Scholar and Hispanic Scholarship fund Scholar, and 2019 Gordon Parks Scholar & YoungArts Winner.
© Carlos Hernandez