"Unfolding Time — Vietnamese Photography: Now and Then"

An-My Lê's photographs and films examine the impact, consequences, and representation of war through the violent transformation of the natural landscape into real and fictional battlefields. Lê explores the disjunction between wars as historical events and the ubiquitous portrayal of war in contemporary entertainment, politics, and collective consciousness. Lê's 29 Palms (2003-04) documents United States Marines conducting war exercises in a virtual Middle East constructed in the California desert. Lê captures the Marines rehearsing a fictional war, and playing the role of their adversaries.

Liza Nyugen visited Vietnam for the first time in 2000. During a second trip in 2004, the artist traveled to villages and forests decimated by Agent Orange and other wartime toxins. Nyugen collected handfuls of earth from nineteen sites, carried the soil back to her studio in Europe, and photographed each sample on a clinical white background. Entitled Surface, Nyugen's series is an archive of absence and remembrance. In the artist's words, the photographs represent "... bodies turned into dust." Re-imagining the ravaged soil of her father's native country, Surface is a somber and beautiful portrait of loss amidst new possibilities.

Exhibition runs through February 28, 2010 at Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Avenue, Portland.
Blue Sky Gallery receives General Support funding from RACC.