256 Worldbuilding Through Memory and Myth: Elias Hernandez on Storytelling, Surrealism, and the Legacy of Conflict

"Worldbuilding Through Memory and Myth: Elias Hernandez on Storytelling, Surrealism, and the Legacy of Conflict"

In this immersive episode of What’s My Thesis?, host Javier Proenza welcomes artist and educator Elias Hernandez, whose deeply narrative visual practice draws from Latin American surrealism, video game aesthetics, and inherited stories of displacement and resilience. A recent MFA graduate from USC and collaborator with cult streetwear label Brain Dead, Hernandez charts a complex universe in his paintings—populated by star-bearing knights, sentient castles, and time-traveling wizards—where memory, mythology, and trauma are rendered in fantastical allegory.

Born in Mountain View and raised between the Bay Area and Sunnyvale, Hernandez reflects on a childhood steeped in card games like Magic: The Gathering, which sparked his fascination with visual storytelling. These early interests evolved into a practice that explores “the burden and blessing” of cultural inheritance—from Salvadoran family histories shaped by civil war to folkloric Catholic imagery and Latin American feminist surrealism.

In conversation, Hernandez discusses how drawing, teaching, and game-inspired worldbuilding intersect in his creative process. His paintings act as sequential mythologies—each one building upon the last—presenting a nonlinear, symbolic narrative of a hero's journey infused with biblical allusions, cosmic cults, and archetypes of good and evil. These compositions resist linear interpretation, instead inviting viewers into a slow unfolding of meaning that echoes oral tradition and pre-Columbian storytelling.

As Hernandez explains, his work is not overtly political, yet it is politicized by its very existence within American contemporary art spaces. Drawing from artists like Otto Dix, Diego Rivera, and Leonora Carrington, his practice embodies a transhistorical dialogue where surrealist aesthetics and contemporary iconography converge—memes, murals, and medieval allegory colliding in a uniquely generational vision.

Highlights include:

• How early exposure to fantasy media and tabletop gaming shaped his narrative sensibility

• The role of inherited trauma in the creative act and character development

• Reflections on his time as a bilingual educator in Oakland and the visual languages of immigrant youth

• A detailed breakdown of his fictional universe, including moon-worshipping cults and star-forging armor

• The spiritual dimensions of drawing and ceramics as ritual practices

• Insight into Central American cultural erasure and mythological reimaginings

Hernandez’s work transcends medium and genre, bridging pop culture with ancient cosmology, and positioning painting as a vehicle for complex identity expression and speculative folklore. This episode is an invitation into the mind of a worldbuilder—one who channels collective memory into realms where the past haunts, empowers, and transforms.

Follow Elias Hernandez on Instagram @eliasxhernandez and visit his website at www.eliashernandez.art.

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