Kelley Hernandez is an American artist located in Gainesville, Florida. She is currently in her senior year at the University of Florida, majoring in Painting. She is inspired by patterns and complex compositions.
When I relate back to my youth, I think about games I used to play, like tag and hide and seek, and I recall the exhilarating feelings behind them. Even as adults we play a version of these games. We have to hide certain aspects of ourselves to fit in, keep our true selves from being found… being found out. Playground tag, the concept of striving to touch something, is both a sexual beginning and a form of reaching understanding. If you’re tagged, you are it—different. I use divisions and separations in my work to create a complexity and fragmentation of thoughts, this is further displayed in my sporadic styles of painting varying in thick areas to thin, translucent to opaque. My work tries to emulate the psychological processes we go through as children to reach an understanding of an adult world by exploring the duality between childhood naivety and sexual realization.