Celesté (Andrés) Hernández: 'My Faith Won't Move Mountains But My Longing Builds Bridges Across the Mexican Border To Be By Your Side'
On view at The Hill Street Country Club through Feb. 28, 2022
Tijuana-based artist and writer Celesté Hernández opened a solo show, "Crying on the Blue Line Trolley" at The Hill Street Country Club (HSCC) in January, her first solo exhibition. It's multidisciplinary, though at the center of the show are oversized prints of analog photographs taken from her route back and forth across the US-Mexico border, mostly on the trolley. In this way, it's hard to pick just one work — each seems like a pause, a breath taken, on a journey.
Hernández's work is intensely vulnerable and specific, though in these pictures of bridges, overpasses, trolley seats and landscapes she manages to offer her deeply personal story in a universal form.
This work, "My Faith Won't Move Mountains But My Longing Builds Bridges Across The Mexican Border To Be By Your Side" packs so much into one relatively sparse scene, washed in an analog softness: a border dividing two partners, and a suggestion of the agony of separation and a long and volatile history at the border.
An artist talk with Hernández along with regional poet and professor Karla Cordero will take place Saturday, Jan. 29 at 1 p.m. (RSVP for the talk here).
HSCC is showing the exhibition by appointment only, Friday through Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. 530 S. Coast Hwy., Oceanside. [Exhibition details]