Sabor A Mí, 2024

The David Brower Center presents Sabor A Mí, a special exhibition of paintings by queer Peruvian multidisciplinary artist Andrea Sifuentes Hernández.

The exhibition highlights the challenges of engaging in meaningful reflection on omnipresent consumption and confronts the resulting flow of waste and pollution. These works are the latest in an ongoing series, painted from photographs of the artist’s personal life, depicting intimate moments marked by inescapable modern iconography. Globally recognized brands and characters like Hello Kitty and Coca-Cola are instantly identifiable. Sifuentes Hernández's works examine the remarkable popularity of these products and images in Peruvian society—from the neighborhood markets of Lima, the coastal metropolis where she was born, to the Andean city of Chachapoyas, nestled in the cloud forests of the Amazonas region, her family’s homeland.

Sabor A Mí expands this autobiographical series of pictorial representations, maintaining the square format of Instagram posts, where she includes scenes from her travels in the United States as well as her life in Peru.

Sifuentes Hernández’s work explores how our overlapping identities—whether regional, national, ethnic, social, and/or political—are reflected in the marketing of consumer goods. Her paintings often depict the iconic Peruvian soda Inca Kola, a beverage so beloved nationwide that Coca-Cola incorporated it into its product line in 1999 after failing to surpass its sales in Peru. Alongside their commercial growth, foods and entertainment products that reach this level of popularity become canonized as aesthetic markers of our identities. Eventually, they become as familiar and immediate to us as the animals, plants, and minerals from which they are physically and conceptually derived.

Vivid and personal, yet deeply critical, Sifuentes Hernández’s paintings confront the contradictions of life in our current moment. As a queer woman in a deeply patriarchal culture, she employs a controlled yet evocative form of self-portraiture to express the richness of her life and relationships while simultaneously protecting them. Her work demonstrates the realism and clarity of vision necessary to understand and address the impact of global production and consumption patterns on our societies and the environment.

All works are acrylic on canvas, 2024.