Advent East is a performance that re-appropriates and uses the seminal American Western painting, "American Progress" created by John Ghast in 1872, as a reference point to contest colonial ideas of American westward expansion.
Sebastian Hernandez is an LA native and multi-disciplinary artist who received a B.A. in both Art Practice and Dance and Performance Studies from the University of California Berkeley in 2016. They make art that ranges from drawings to paintings and performance artworks. Hernandez employs a feminist theoretical analysis, queer theory, gender, browness, and notions of collectivity as modes of thinking and generating works that shift and complicate Mexican and Chicano narratives in the contemporaneous social imagination. Their art making is influenced by an embedded connection to their indigenous Aztec/Mexica heritage and the history of the brown body in relation to the U.S.-Mexico borderland. Sebastian’s movement-based practice is informed by their long-standing practice of Danza Azteca, Vogue, and the more recent wide range of modern dance techniques they acquired at Cal. Sebastian’s work inherently challenges traditional notions of space as they deal with their work’s interdisciplinary nature within both art and dance contexts.