photography

Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles, and an adjunct professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, will be in conversation with Jessica Vaughn, a Brooklyn and Philadelphia-based multimedia artist whose practice is a dedication to understanding materials and images and how they function politically, socially and conceptually in the world. Her most recent artworks in sculpture, video, and photography interrogate questions of labor, race, architecture and modularity in space.

Pao Houa Her is a Hmong American artist whose practice engages primarily with legacies and potentials of landscape, portraiture, and documentary photographic traditions and aesthetics, creating works that examine identity, longing, and belonging in Hmong diasporic communities. Among Her’s solo exhibitions include Paj quam ntuj / Flowers of the Sky at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2022–2023), Emplotment at Or Gallery in Vancouver, Canada (2020), and My grandfather turned into a tiger at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis (2018). Recently exhibited in the Whitney Biennial (2022), her work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC; the Milwaukee Art Museum; MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; among many others. A prizewinner in the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (2022), Her was the recipient of the McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship (2022 and 2016), and the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2019). Notable public collections include the Singapore Art Museum and the Walker Art Center. Her is an assistant professor in Photography and Moving Images at the University Minnesota. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Yale University School of Art (2012) and a BFA in Photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009). Born in Laos in 1982, Her was raised in Minnesota and is based in Blaine.

My research examines the use of archival imagery, written word, and various methods of organization to identify facets of personal history. The photographic works I create exert an overarching umbrella of control, and employ organizational structures to do so. These actions allow me to have the feeling of control over the past, present and future by reordering my environment. My thesis explores the culmination of these themes, using it as an opportunity to explore systems of management as I experience life events. The work explores an interest in the visual passage of time through order, often times contrasting moments at rest and moments of tension. In processing these periods of tension I explore mechanisms for privacy and actions of work. An overarching discussion of creating as a form of escapism emerges.

Starting with the creation of Myspace, I delve into my history with loneliness and the new "Social Photo" as defined by social media theorist, Nathan Jurgensen. Thinking about our new form of communication and the history of the photograph, I look at how the work of photographers Nan Goldin and Bill Owens approach truth in their work. Comparing our common desire for connection to an image that depicts an honest reality, I approach my work as a photographic installation artist with the background of social media. Equating this form of experience to the creation of the Disneyland theme park, viewed as the crux of the new social image, I examine how experience is upheld on social platforms that perpetuates loneliness, boredom, and consumerism in our app-obsessed time of post truth, and how those thoughts can change if we learn from those experiences and sit with our difficult emotions.

I use my art practice to express the dualities, issues, questions, feelings and conflicts of a bi-national, bi-culture, and bi-language woman identity - pain, belonging, struggles, cultural loss, self-esteem, acceptance, and inclusion. My practice transports the audience into the experience of being in my world - emotionally and physically - by utilizing Painting, Installation, Sculpture, and Photography. This is portrayed by using elements such as body language, facial expressions, objects, shadows, and nature. My use of iconography is important to represent both the Mexican and American cultures, inspired by the symbolic metaphors of Frida Kahlo. My depiction of dualities is influenced by Cindy Sherman and Ana Mendieta. The colors used in the work reference the national flags, culture and emotions. The materials, such as tissue paper and paper mache, interpret the Mexican handicraft and piñatas, and chicken wire and wire fences relates to the barbed wire and fence of the U.S. and Mexico border. In the U.S., some of these issues are shared between the Chicanx, Latinx, immigrants, women, and minority communities. My work, as well as this paper, decolonizes art and is made to represent the people that resonate with it.

This thesis explores the immigrants and refugees in the United States of America and Malaysia. Through making portraits of immigrants and refugees, it helps the artist as third-generation Chinese from Malaysia and Resident Alien in the United States of America to find the sense of belonging in both places where he feels like he does not belong. Portrait photography and landscape photography are the two components of this thesis project. Photographic flash is heavily used in the making of portraits as well. This thesis project is to honor immigrants and refugees, to have them present themselves as they want to be seen, but not necessarily as we typically see them.

On April 13th, 2016, I was diagnosed with stage III Hodgkin's Lymphoma. More prevalent than anything else felt at the time was a deep sense of powerlessness as my oncologist explained my only option was chemotherapy or I would be dead within a year. Photographing personal trauma through the documentation of spaces and objects as evidence of my illness articulates the destructive effects of chemotherapy treatment and the parallel conflicts created by its current role as the immediate response to cancer diagnosis. By means of my personal experiences with sickness, my now-intimate view of the medical industry has allowed me to interrogate a world not often explored. In facing the overwhelming list of side effects present in chemotherapy, I question its place as a go-to method of treatment. Through photographic exploration, I documented spaces within the hospital as well as my home post-treatment, as a way to develop these questions in an artistic manner, and offer the viewer a first person perspective, generating an empathetic experience when considering this work. As I have been directly impacted by the limited choices offered by my oncologist, it is with personal interest, moral interest, and artistic interest that I investigate this subject matter.

This thesis looks at the struggle towards understanding for myself what it means to be man, has been the crux of my work for the last few years. Looking at both the interior and exterior factors that influence and effect identity formation has been key to my own understanding. Examining the internal restraint and external constraint that influenced those facets during my formative years, have been helpful in understanding how I interpret my own gender and sexuality today. Using a myriad of research strategies and an ever-expanding grasp of mediums and materials, I have begun to map and explore the terrain of masculinity as I see it and experience it. While at times personal and private, my works strives to ride the line of how much detail to report and express, as I chart the terrain in-line with my own ever evolving discovery and understanding.