CASETalks Presents: Binh Danh / Corey Keller

Saturday, May 8, 2021 10 – 11 am

CASETALKS PRESENTS: BINH DANH / COREY KELLER

"You Don't Belong Here!"

Vietnamese-born photographer Binh Danh is an artist whose work investigates his heritage and our collective memory of war. Danh works with chlorophyll on leaves and the daguerreotype to honors victims of the Killing Fields, Khmer temples, genocide, and most recently Yosemite, one of America's most iconic sites. As he stated, "Growing up in San Jose, California, I wanted my parents to take us camping. Camping in the woods, in tents, was the most American thing to do. Yosemite would have been fantastic to visit as a kid. But my parents couldn't understand why anyone would want to put themselves in harm's way like that in nature." Danh will be in conversation with Corey Keller, Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, about his art and what it is like to be an Asian in America today.

BINH DANH

Binh Danh (b. 1977, Vietnam) reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. As a child who immigrated to the US from war-torn Vietnam in 1979, the memories and trauma of his diasporic experience serve as the foundation for his investigative practice. In his highly acclaimed series of chlorophyll prints, Danh uses photosynthesis to print portraits from the Vietnam War era directly onto the surfaces of leaves. Danh is also noted for his contemporary daguerreotypes of national parks. Their reflective surfaces enable people of all backgrounds to see themselves as a part of the beauty of the American landscape. His work has been collected by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and San Jose Museum of Art, among others. He is an assistant professor of art at San José State University.



COREY KELLER

Corey Keller is the Curator of Photography and acting head of the Photography Department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where she has been a member of the curatorial team since 2003. During her tenure, she has organized numerous exhibitions, including, most recently, Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis, which highlights seven Bay Area artists’ responses to the crises of 2020. Other recent major projects include Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene (2019), the first survey exhibition of this nineteenth-century photographer-archaeologist, and the major retrospective Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020, co-organized with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Recent writing projects include an essay on Imogen Cunningham’s portrait of painter David Park (SFMOMA, 2020); entries on early women photographers in California (Une histoire des femmes photographes mondiale, 2020); and a consideration of the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey, and Clare Strand and the representation of the laboring body (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2020).

 

CASETalks

Binh Danh & Corey Keller

"You Don't Belong Here!"

A discussion about identity seen through the eyes of an Asian artist

Saturday, May 8, 2021

10:00 - 11:00 am CT

register here

CASETalks is a monthly online series that happens every second Saturday at 10:00 am CT via Zoom. Artists are in conversation with curators, historians & other CASE partners.



CASETalks is sponsored by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation

Top image:  Children of Angkar #5, 2021, 12 x 10 ” Daguerreotype in a 14 3/4 x 12 1/2 case sealed with Optium Museum Acrylic & mat , Ed. of 10 + 5APs, $3,500