Year of the Nak is getting off to a great start for Lao American artist Sisavanh Phouthavong who recently celebrated her birthday in March. Tinney Contemporary has announced ctrl + alt + del, an exhibition featuring works by Sisavanh Phouthavong. The exhibition will be on display April 6, 2024 through May 18, 2024. The opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 6th from 2—8 PM in conjunction with the First Saturday Art Crawl.
Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton is a Lao-American mixed media visual artist born in Vientiane, Laos in the Year of the Nak. She creates vibrant paintings, collages, and sculptures, utilizing abstraction as a means of exploring refugee identity, colonial violence, and the generational impact of displacement. Having fled Laos with her family amidst the fallout from the Vietnam war, Phouthavong engages both personal and collective memories of armed conflict with particular attention to the “Secret War” on Laos, during which the US government dropped over 2.5 million tons of ordnance on the artist’s homeland—the largest bombing campaign in recorded history.
The works in the exhibition this season render glitched and abstracted translations of images taken during conflicts in Laos and Vietnam, as well as from ongoing conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. These “map-based” works take the aerial viewpoint of state surveillance and drone strikes; of ever-shifting, contested national borders. However, by virtue of Phouthavong’s geometric distortions and glitch-like aberrations, the map is thwarted by the war-torn territory. The works might be read as an attempt to collapse the gap between past conflicts and the present—a distance embraced in Empire’s tendency to sanitize its own colonial past. Though narrated in the anesthetic, historical past-tense, the trauma of colonial violence remains present—in the case of Laos, quite literally, as roughly 50 civilian casualties of unexploded cluster bombs are reported each year.
She has shown work at the Hunter Museum of American Art, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, The Reece Museum and upcoming exhibitions at the Mint Museum and Gadsden Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street International, Click_Bait, Create Magazine, Studio Visit Magazine, The Tennessean, The Pinch Journal Publication, Voices of America and The Next Door Neighbor. Her work is a part of several permanent collections including the Hunter Museum of American Art, American Embassy, Paramaribo, Suriname; Legacies of War Office, Washington, D.C.; Tennessee State Museum; Pinnacle Bank, Memphis and Nashville, TN. Her painting of Lao American poet Bryan Thao Worra was used for the acclaimed cover of his 2020 collection BEFORE WE REMEMBER WE DREAM during the 45th anniversary of the end of the Laotian Civil War. She been an inspiriting presence at many of the Lao American Writers Summits and exhibitions such as the 1.5 Generation convened by the SEAD Project in 2020 in Minneapolis.
This year is particularly important for an exhibit such as this considering that it is the 50th anniversary since the end of the US Secret War, which had significant implications on US foreign policy up into the present day including the use of covert operations and cluster munitions. Sisavanh Phouthavong occupies a very rare position in the Lao community in diaspora as fewer than 1% of the Lao refugees in the US graduate college and pursue a master’s degree or higher, and few of those are teaching at the college level and few of those are teaching in the visual arts. She earned her BFA from the University of Kansas and completed her MFA at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL. She began exhibiting as early as 2002. These days she is a painting professor at Middle Tennessee State University. In 2014, she won an MTSU Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award, one of many distinctions she has been recognized for.
We have no doubt there will be many more exciting announcements about her projects ahead!
photo by Krysada Phounsiri