Jonathan Hernández

Begun over a decade ago, Vulnerabilia is built upon Jonathan Hernández’s fascination with our media-saturated present. The title of the series evokes the idea of “vulnerability” while referencing the delicacy of the original materials that 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.

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.