CAW Throws Open The Gallery

Even from the outside of the building, it’s clear that the gallery at Creative Arts Workshop has been transformed, by a gigantic, shimmering web of fabric. The piece is by artist Antonius-Tín Bui, and it’s made from traditional Vietnamese garments, and as a note explains, they are ​“a safety net of embrace, the promise of renewal, and an undeniable statement of the Vietnamese people’s vibrancy and connectedness throughout past, present, and future generations.” The piece is also a flag welcoming visitors to not one, but two shows at CAW — ​“Băng Qua Nước: Across Land, Across Water” and ​“Common,” both running now through Nov. 26, with a reception scheduled for this evening at 5:30 p.m. — that are part of the ongoing Open Source Festival organized by Artspace.

In ​“Băng Qua Nước: Across Land, Across Water” — curated by Ivy Vuong — ​“Connecticut-based Vietnamese artists Thuan Vu, Antonius-Tín Bui, Quyên Trương, and Thu Tran explores how home(s) exist, twist, and meld across land and water for Vietnamese peoples. The word nước in Vietnamese can mean homeland, nation, or water. Water gave passage to loss and new lives for thousands of Vietnamese ​‘boat people’ escaping Vietnam post-1975 in the wake of the fall of Saigon. This displacement fraught with grief yet teeming with strength and resilience, is felt in this exhibition.”

The show, in some sense, explores the idea of dislocation, both physical, of people moving from the place where they’re from, and mental and emotional, from people being in a place where they don’t feel they entirely belong. As the artists point out, the immigrant experience of dislocation for Vietnamese-Americans is sharpened, still, by the Vietnam War. Sometimes the war is the direct reason people are here, because they are refugees. But even if it’s not, Vietnamese-Americans still must contend with the war’s legacy, of having once been seen as an enemy, and the wary strangeness that comes from that.

Sweet Autumn is an attempt to process all of that. In the pastoral scene, the figures belong; the question is where that place is, and whether it can be found. As an accompanying note explains, the path in the painting is ​“leading toward a home of the artist Thu Tran’s imagination. Not Vietnam, Canada, or the United States, where Tran has lived, this home is perhaps a comforting combination of their most beautiful memories.” As the description implies, it also doesn’t entirely exist.

Meanwhile, artist Thuan Vu’s neighboring piece seeks to depict something of the maelstrom refugees find themselves, as elements of their lives ​“swirl endlessly together.” The ​“dizzying land/sea/scape” is intended as a ​“description of a refugee’s mental landscape.” The artist qualifies the painting by saying that ​“it’s not all hard work; it can be joyful. There can be nuance, excitement, sorrow, poetry. It’s all shifting, all the time.” One thing it is not is settled.

If home cannot be a fixed physical place, the exhibition asks, can it be the people we surround ourselves with? Can it be built out of the memories of the past, even if those memories are fractured? Thuan Vu’s Transients series (there are a few of them on display in the exhibition) ​“is inspired by the Vietnamese craft tradition of using charcoal powder to inexpensively render photographic likenesses of deceased family members.” But Vu ​“subverts this tradition by depicting, enlarging, and blurring living figures and removing them from time and space.” The pieces point out that our ancestors and those living around us both have a say in the construction of our community, and there can be ways in which they blend together, in something as simple as sharing a meal. 

Similarly, Quyên Trương’s piece celebrates the names in her family as ​“important markers of our individual and cultural identities. Often mispronounced, her late father’s name, Dung, can be traced in a painting.… She recalls how he never accommodated the mispronunciations by changing his name, but would instead introduce it proudly.” It’s a lesson in strength and resilience while finding one’s footing in a new place.

But as all the artists well know, the history is still there, working its influence on their lives, and they move through their lives in the tensions between the positive and negative forces in their cultural past. Antonius-Tín Bui’s short film gives this tension a sharp visual form, as they and their sibling ​“perform intuitive dancing at three Vietnam Memorial sites across the U.S. East Coast. The film complicates understandings of these public monuments as sites identifying American soldiers as the primary victims of the Vietnam/American War while the many Southeast Asians lost to it, including Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong people, remain nameless on the black reflective stone. In an act of radical redemption, the Bui siblings inscribe themselves and their ancestors upon the stone as they dance across it.” 

The confrontation can and should be bracing. But the video is the tip of the spear for this exhibition, which makes the complex point that there is an entire group of people caught up in the legacy of the way American society has constructed the Vietnam War in the public imagination. In terms of the conflict alone, the typical U.S. view simplifies it and makes the U.S. its focus, when for the Vietnamese, the war with the U.S. was just the second phase of a much longer period of conflict that began against the French before the U.S. arrived and continued against Cambodia after the U.S. left, and did not end until 1989. And that is to say nothing of U.S. understandings of Vietnamese culture and politics. Vietnamese-Americans must contend with all these misunderstandings, and as the artists suggest, they find the strength to do so all around them.

Bui’s large sculpture, rising from the first floor to the second, visually connects ​“Băng Qua Nước” to ​“Common,” a show that ​“highlights CAW’s esteemed teaching artists showcasing the wide-ranging work taught at CAW with painting, drawing, printmaking, pottery, metalworking, fiber arts, book arts, photography, and sculpture on display. In daily life, common can mean something simple and unrefined or convey a sense of unity and harmony. This show leans into both definitions, highlighting this group of artists at times intersecting and converging, playing off one another, moving together toward new unexplored territory.” The two shows aren’t connected, but in the context of the Open Source Festival, it means that a visit to the gallery offers breath and depth, a chance to dive into a specific set of artistic and cultural concerns, and then to take a flight of stairs, switch gears, and admire what the artists in the CAW faculty have been up to. The diversity of art, from painting to photography to printmaking to sculpture, makes for a feast.

Among the many pieces on display is Heidi Harrington’s portrait of her family; the name implies that it was made during lockdown, which lends a poignancy to the figures. Did they pose for the paintings, their stillness in front of the easel reflecting the larger ways they couldn’t really go anywhere? What were they thinking at the time? And was Harrington’s painting of them a confrontation with the circumstances? An escape from it? Maybe a bit of both?

If Harrington’s painting is about the emotions beneath the surface, Amira Brown’s piece strips that surface away to reveal the feelings and ideas in all their tumult — too much for the canvas to contain.

The show does well at finding moments for the pieces to talk to one another. Eric March’s study for a representational painting and Maura Galante’s abstract print in some ways have nothing to do with one another, but in the juxtaposition of the cool colors in March’s pieces and the warmer colors in Galante’s, they feel like complements.

The sculptures, meanwhile, have a distinct (and welcome) trend toward the playful, whether it’s Paulette Rosen’s exploded book or Hayne Bayless’s teapots that incorporate shovel handles into their design. The exhibition suggests that, as students return more fully to CAW’s classes, they find the faculty as fully engaged as ever, ready to teach some of the most established artistic techniques around while also finding new ways to deploy them.

“Băng Qua Nước: Across Land, Across Water” and ​“Common” run concurrently on the first and second floors, respectively, of the Hilles Gallery at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through Nov. 26. The shows are part of the Open Source Festival; an opening reception is scheduled for tonight. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information.