Feature Articles


September Issue 2001

UNC-Charlotte in Charlotte, NC, Features Photographs by Sheila Pinkel

UNC Charlotte's Rowe Arts Gallery in Charlotte, NC, invites the public to Hmong in Transition, an installation by California artist, Sheila Pinkel on view through Sept. 29, 2001.

Pinkel is an artist, writer, professor, independent curator, and political activist. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in galleries at The Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, Scripts College in Claremont, CA and California State University in Los Angeles, Yale University, and the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore. She has lectured widely in such places as the Rochester Institute of Technology, The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, San Francisco Cameraworks Gallery, and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Her work is included in numerous collections including the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, the Center For the Study of Political Graphics, Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Pinkel's exhibition Hmong in Transition, is a four part investigation of the Hmong after the end of the second Laotian war in 1975. In this work, Pinkel explores the intersection of personal testimony, images, information and cultural artifacts to make history dimensional via still images represented in a gallery setting. By triangulating meaning via the juxtaposition of images of Laos or Thailand with images taken in the US and personal testimony, she hopes to challenge conventional assumptions about the them/us duality, pre-literate peoples and cultural values.

Pinkel uses color inkjet prints overlaid with quotes culled from interviews and letters gathered over a ten-year period to create an installation of images, text and cultural artifacts. In 1990, when she began photographing Hmong and Cambodian refugee camps, an 18-year-old Hmong refugee, Kou Chang, was her guide. Pinkel's work focuses on his family in particular, and follows their lives from the refugee camp in Thailand through their move to the US, first to California and then to North Carolina. In Jan. 2000, she further documented the Chang family by traveling to Laos to locate Kou's relatives and tell the larger story of what happened to that part of his family who remained behind.

Pinkel's experience with the Chang family in Laos resulted in her discovery that there was much more to understand about the Hmong experience during and after the war. She further documented Hmong villages in Laos and Thailand and later in 2000 began to focus her attention on conditions in Thailand. This work is presented in the Rowe Gallery as a four-part installation piece, with exhibition titles "The Refugee Camp Experience, Life in the United States, Life in Laos, and Life in Thailand". A previous exhibition review of this work may be found in Southern California's Artweek article, Indochina: The Art of War at Cal State LA.

For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the gallery at 704/687-3315.

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