Made in L.A. 2023: Vincent Enrique Hernandez

Oct 01, 2023

For the past several years, Vincent Enrique Hernandez has been working on an ongoing project, called Valley Tours, an expansive multimedia artwork that, as the title suggests, centers on tours of the San Fernando Valley, commonly referred to as “the Valley.” This 250-square-mile region sits in Los Angeles County and contains more than thirty neighborhoods that make up half of the city of Los Angeles. The Valley is typically considered a lesser-known part of the city, a suburb that is not frequented by tourists and that is often maligned through cultural clichés. Hernandez is interested in these potential lapses of knowledge and inexact preconceptions, and Valley Tours is a means to address them. At the center of the project is the tour itself—a multihour experience spent with the artist driving around in his Valley-themed Volvo—and the project extends to other manifestations, including photographic documentation, sculptures, and postcards.