Bodeck Luna Hernandez

Whether it be murals or gallery pieces, I’d love to describe my artwork as a vessel or a time machine that takes the viewers backwards and forwards in time with me. Nostalgia is a heavy underlying theme from my childhood – contrasting socio-economic lifestyles of people I witnessed growing up in Tondo, Manila, vivid colors inspired by jeepneys and cheap plastic toys, from shanties to buildings to lush tropical islands and pop culture and visual aesthetics from that time. While exploring the relationship between nostalgia, social empowerment, and modern society’s heavy reliance on disposable technology and consumerism, pixels replace the expired human recollections as I paint layers on top of previous underlying images with spray cans and brushstrokes. The process is repeated once again to emulate the sensory habit of replaying a distant visual memory of forgetting and remembrance while maintaining a unified composition through design. This practice of push and pull between rendered figures, bright colors, blurred images, patterns and repainting brings us to the present and visions of better hopes for the future and where we’re going as citizens of this world. This method allows me to create public pieces that are both personal and site-specific to inspire the audience of that neighborhood. For private and public murals, I ensure to research whom would be impacted by the work so the audience could spark a dialogue between each other and inspire a sense of community and pride within the area.