Trash/Value, Albano Hernández's debut solo exhibition at Palmer Gallery, delves into the intricate relationship between consumerism and sustainability, questioning how objects are attributed worth in a world shaped by disposability.
With an aesthetic influenced by the meat industry, Hernández’s practice is rooted in his upbringing in Ávila, Spain - a region strongly connected to agriculture and meat production. This cultural and economic backdrop influences his distinctive hybrid works that are produced using a meat slicer to cut fragments of clay and repurposed materials. Layering each slice meticulously, Hernández creates compositions that challenge traditional categorizations of artistic media and blur the boundaries between painting, sculpture and installation.
At its core, Trash/Value views discarded materials, or “trash,” as a vehicle for memory and meaning. Through slicing, reassembling, and upcycling, Hernández reimagines waste as a medium for renewal and storytelling, reclaiming it as a resource with inherent artistic and creative value. A key installation in the exhibition is Anonymous, a work composed of 315 plastic ear tags, traditionally used to track livestock. Arranged to outline the form of a graph, the installation visualizes the dramatic rise in meat production over the past seventy years, a trend with significant environmental and agricultural consequences. These mass-produced tags serve as the sole physical record of the animals they represent, transforming them into haunting symbols of memory and erasure. Hernández describes this work as an “anonymous cemetery,” where each tag becomes a tangible trace of a life simultaneously shaped and erased by the meat production system. Elevated to the realm of art, the tags draw attention to society’s tendency to neglect and undervalue objects, places and lifeforms which are easily discarded.
