We are pleased to announce the opening of two one-person exhibitions. In the main gallery we will present our second exhibition by the Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê and in Gallery 2 we will show the work of the Cuban artist Esterio Segura.

Dinh Q. Lê’s new body of work, created in Vietnam where the artist currently resides, explores the nature of memory by creating images of the Vietnam War and portraits of people murdered in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. Dinh Q. Lê started The Texture of Memory when he became aware of a symptom called “hysterical blindness”, experienced by about 200 Cambodian women living in Southern California. These women, who lived through the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, are losing their sight without apparent medical reasons.  This variety of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) is one of a number of psychological disturbances experienced by Vietnam War vets and Afghanistan War vets of the former Soviet Union. However “hysterical blindness” is unique to this group of Cambodian women.

In response to these women, Dinh Q. Lê created a series of poetic works that use Braille in order to make a visual artwork about blindness. Working with a group of women in Vietnam, Lê had them embroider, with white thread, visual portraits of loved ones murdered by the Khmer Rouge onto white linen. These white, minimal portraits are meant to be touched so that the oil residue left from viewer’s fingers will make the portraits more visible over the years. Like in all memory work, the more people who participate in the remembering enables the memory to become more visible and hopefully saved from oblivion.

The second part of this show will consist of Dinh Q. Lê’s well-known photo weavings. For the first time Lê has decided to incorporate images from the Vietnam War into his work. After much thought the artist decided to weave images from Hollywood films together with documentary imagery.  Many people in America and in Vietnam recall the Vietnam War from the outpouring of films about this subject. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” is a quote many people remember from the war when in fact it comes from the movie Apocalypse Now. Dinh Q. Lê tries to remind us of the reality of this war and retrieve its’ memory from our Hollywood version.

In Gallery 2 we are proud to show the work of the International Cuban artist Esterio Segura. This artist was featured in the recent Bienal de la Habana. Segura will show newly created work for this exhibition in both sculpture and painting. Esterio uses a vocabulary that mixes aspects of representation drawn from Cuban and Western art history to create a body of work that explores the social and cultural conditions of Cuba today. Segura previously showed in New York in 1996 at Art in General.