Aug 24, 2020 - Aug 25, 2021
The artist-curated C.A.R.S. Online series features past participants in the long running Critic & Artist Residency Series, which was founded in 1997 to bring prominent artists, critics, and curators to the Colorado State University campus for public lectures, classroom visits, and exhibitions. The virtual exhibition series brings together the artists’ own work and works from the museum’s collection, shedding new light on familiar objects and drawing out themes in the artist-curator's own works. The first show of the series was curated by Binh Danh, who was a C.A.R.S. participant in 2008. His chlorophyll print photograph Barracked (2005) was the first work accessioned into the museum's collection when we were founded in 2009.
Binh Danh (MFA Stanford; BFA San Jose State University) emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war. His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on nineteenth-century photographic processes, applying them in an investigation of battlefield landscapes and contemporary memorials. A recent series of daguerreotypes celebrated the United States National Park system during its anniversary year.
His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern art, The DeYoung Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the George Eastman Museum, and many others. He received the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and in 2012 he was a featured artist at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in Australia. He is represented by Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA and Lisa Sette Gallery in Phoenix, AZ. He lives and works in San Jose, CA and teaches photography at San Jose State University.
NOTE: The virtual exhibition works best in Chrome (Mac) or Edge (PC).
Life, Times, and Matters of Swamp
Friday, April 4, 2008
Binh Danh has quietly gained recognition on the international art scene for his Vietnam War inspired work. In his most recognizable work appropriated war images are printed directly onto leaves or grass. Using nature’s ability to respond to light, Binh creates his work using photosynthesis. He came to Light Work ready to expand his work. He printed images of a former refugee camp and worked on images of The Swamp Thing, which he ties to the Vietnam series in its connection to memory and plants.
Binh Danh was born in Vietnam in 1977. He received an MFA at Stanford University and a BFA from San Jose State University. His work has been shown internationally, most recently in group exhibitions Picturing Eden at the George Eastman House in Rochester, Asian American Art Now at the Asia Society Museum in New York City, and Reconstructing Histories Project at the University of Hawaii Art Museum, and in the solo exhibition Ancestral Altars at Haines Gallery in San Francisco. He lives and works in San Jose, CA.