Akasha Hernandez

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Akasha (Jade Becerra Hernandez)

Limina

Limina - a threshold(s) below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguished from another.

Dying is one such threshold.

Limina is a body of work that deeply inspects the liminality of dying. Each visual death is testament to “Memento Mori” (Socrates - the philosophical reminder of the inevitability of death). These visual mundane deaths are what point to the temporal and fragile nature of the environment. Though perspective might enlighten us on the large scale limina we are faced with each day, the thoughtless manner in which we meander through daily life obstructs our observance of little moments of dying. This ultimately blinds us from the large scale limina that surrounds us.

The works are their own imperfect attempt to preserve or capture a moment of death in its most vulnerable state of liminality. The organic materiality is testimony to a remnant of each life lived, yet by intervention have come to reflect on the mezzanine between worlds.

The combination of cold thriving  mould and warm dead wool pay homage to the concept of Limina. Each object, an insignificant death that begs reverence. An ode to the mundane deaths.

The beeswax has been in my family since childhood, and is thus a relic to both my upbringing and the bees that created it.

The wax was moulded with the heat from my hands and imbued with the skin of my youth, preserved insects and fragments of plant matter that - like amber - preserve fragments of life and death. Beeswax is a by-product of a bees life, and we know that without bees many plants and animals would cease to exist. Bees are what anchors many lives to existence. Thus the use of their wax as a veil is a tributary veneration of the symbiosis that we have with our surrounding ecosystem, a kind of  testimony to the myriad of the creatures on which our own existence is predicated.

Our failure to cogitate on subtle liminalities is cause to the amnesia towards the broader decay around us.