Dan45 Hernandez: Rememories

Dan45 Hernandez, Pez Totems 1 - 5 (detail), 2021, Pastel, cardboard

Dan45 Hernandez, Rememories at Savidan Gallery, Las Vegas. On view through June 26, 2021.

By D.K. Sole

Dan45 Hernandez’s solo exhibition asks a question, what is the size of memory? Memory is in the title, it’s mentioned in the explanatory text; furthermore the artist includes written autobiographical memories in his pieces, and further-furthermore he draws and paints objects whose time has passed, like VHS tapes or He-Man villains from the 1980s. So what is the size of memory? On the floor there is a middle-sized pile of shaped, stuffed pillows, each one with a portrait of a plastic toy painted on one side and an anecdote about Hernandez’s memory of the toy on the other. The form of it – a pile – tells you it could get bigger with more toys. It isn’t clear why the pile isn’t huge. On the wall next to the pile there are examples of the gigantism that the pile could achieve: a row of three unusually thin, tall canvases – almost as high as the ceiling – each one depicting a stack of objects from the artist’s personal history. Cassette tapes, for example. Lunch boxes.

The straightforward up-down shape of each stack leads the three pieces naturally to their dimensions of tallness and thinness. Now that the subject and the form make sense together they can start responding to the question about memory. A memory, they tell us, is huge. Memory blows up a small thing like a cassette tape to an abnormal size and then it makes it more significant by surrounding it with more of its kind. It is bigger than you. Its presence affects the way you experience your surroundings, meaning, in this case, the wall, and the floor next to it, and the rest of the room.

Around the corner, a field of pastel drawings depicting Pez dispensers develops the argument without needing to suggest the same obedience to gravity as a stack of tapes. Now the individual objects float upright in their rectangular cells, independently, on nothing. The drawings are small, but tiled end to end and side by side they make a large plane. (The label explains them as five columns: Pez Totems 1 – 5.) If you had enough of these drawings you could wallpaper the whole gallery. Would changing the size of the display by filling the room like that somehow violate the artist’s intentions? I don’t think so. Memory (the Pez argue, as they march before you in militaristic lines) is implicitly unstoppable. When I mentioned my feelings about the toy pile to Dan45 (disclosure: he is one of my work colleagues) he told me the problem was time. The piece would have been bigger if he’d had the time to make more of them. What is the size of memory? It is the size of something that can get bigger with time.

Dan45 Hernandez, Rememories
at Savidan Gallery, inside the Faciliteq Showroom, 2nd Floor, 1310 South 3rd St, Las Vegas
May 20 – June 26, 2021
Closing reception June 26.

Posted by D.K. Sole on June 7th, 2021