photo: rr jones

Jo Farb Hernández is married to artist Sam Hernández. Sam’s work can be found on his website, http://www.samhernandezart.com. He comments:

“I am a New World man. Although ancestrally I am Spanish/Catalan, these cultural influences have been diffused through a Cuban, Mexican, Californio, and American lens. These influences are evident, although not necessarily primary, in my work. They are balanced by my reflections upon the arts of other tribal/ traditional/indigenous peoples; particularly archetypes of African, South Pacific, Meso-American, and Native American traditions. Historically, all are, to some degree, cultures that have melded with the Hispanic world.

Most recently spending extended periods of time in Spain, I have found a country at first glance superficially homogeneous, but in actuality diverse in Catalan, Celtic, Basque, Arabic, and Sephardic traditions, among others. I have been directly inspired by the formalist power of handmade objects of daily life as, at the same time, I necessarily approach them tempered by the diverse conceptual resources I have acquired throughout my professional career in much the same way that the Modernists did at the turn of the last century. In recent years I have attempted to tap Asian philosophical disciplines of working methods and adapt more of an egoless, less contrived aesthetic, working in a more stream-of-consciousness manner, as I have also increasingly incorporated Spanish themes and language into my work. Whatever comes, comes: it has become an amalgam of influences from both old and new worlds, balancing both the negative and positive aspects of the interactions resulting from the Conquest and the relationships across the oceans that have fostered such different perspectives. I delineate all of these cultural impressions through a complex formalist aesthetic that fuses these resources into a matrix in which I study, reflect, integrate, and interpret my interest in world cultures, attempting to embrace each unique tradition and distill it through my own unique vision.”