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Binh Danh Exhibition Opening

August 14-October 23, 2007
Gallery Reception: September 6, 2007, 5-8pm
Artist Lecture by Binh Danh begins at 6:30pm

Light Work is pleased to announce the opening of its exhibition One Week's Dead featuring the work of Vietnamese-American photographer Binh Danh, who has quietly gained recognition on the international art scene for his Vietnam War-inspired work.

This exhibition features his most recognizable work, comprising appropriated war images that are printed directly onto leaves or grass, a process Danh invented while in college. On his first trip to Vietnam since his family immigrated to the United States, Danh was confronted by the remains of the war, such as bomb craters that had been converted into rice paddies, and he observed that memories of the war's devastation had become part of daily life. It was this experience that inspired him to create chlorophyll prints of found images from the Vietnam War with tropical leaves, sharing, in his words, the "epiphany that the memory of those people and events will reverberate forever through the country's landscape."

Of his work, Danh states, "Much of my research has explored my own personal history and has become a way of visually and physically recollecting my family's history and honoring their collective memory." These concepts are very real with regard to any culture that has immigrated to the United States, looking at the stories families tell and the disconnected feeling experienced by the second generation.

Danh was born in Vietnam in 1977. He received a BFA degree from San Jose State University and an MFA degree from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Asia Society Museum in New York City, the University of Hawaii Art Museum and the Haines Gallery in San Francisco. He lives and works in San Jose, CA. He participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program in 2006. His work can be seen at www.binhdanh.com.

Light Work will feature an exhibition titled The Lost Photos of Vietnam, featuring the photographs of Al Fasoldt. During the Vietnam War, Fasoldt was a photographer for Stars & Stripes. When he left Vietnam to come home, he left his negatives behind and brought a few 8x10" prints and contact sheets of his work. Since then, the Pentagon has ordered all negatives of Stars & Stripes photographers be destroyed. Over the past few years, Fasoldt has been working to repair the prints and contact sheets he brought home years ago, using them to make prints of his Vietnam War images for exhibition.

Also on view at this time is the Light Work Grants exhibition, featuring the work of the 2007 grant recipients-Brantley Carroll, Ella Gant and David Moore.