Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York is pleased to announce the solo exhibition and Aperture-published monograph by Pao Houa Her, recipient of the 2023 Next Step Award, a partnership between Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, in collaboration with the 7|G Foundation. The exhibition will be on view February 7-March 20, 2024 in the Gallery Space at 126 Baxter St.

Pao Houa Her is a Hmong American artist whose practice primarily engages the legacies and potentials of the photographic genres of landscape, still life, documentary, and portraiture in relation to identity, desire and belonging in Hmong diasporic communities. In her words, photography is “a truth if you want it to be a truth.” The solo exhibition And Other Illusions brings together a selection of new works from various series made between 2016-2022 including black and white and color photographs, collage and lenticular works, and a large-scale lightbox. Following Her’s participation in the Whitney Biennale 2022, And Other Illusions marks her first solo exhibition in New York City. The exhibition at Baxter St is accompanied by a 124-page monograph entitled My grandfather turned into a tiger …and other illusions, published by Aperture, which includes eighty images, three new essays, and an interview with the artist.

Highlighting six of Her’s major series, both the exhibition and monograph include the title work, And Other Illusions , which draws on oral history to imagine homeland. The portrait series and installation Attention (2015) honors Hmong veterans who unofficially fought for the United States in the Vietnam War, while My Mother’s Flowers (2016) pairs tonally rich black and white still lifes of Her’s mother’s silk flowers with hyper-colored and digitally manipulated portraits of anonymous Hmong women from dating sites. The stark landscapes that comprise the Mount Shasta (2021-2022) lightboxes bear witness to the dry volcanic lands of northern California. As they recall the historical entwinement of imaging and settling land, they allude to the region’s Hmong cannabis farmers drawing on ancestral knowledge of highland agriculture. 

Pao Houa Her was born somewhere in the northern jungles of Laos. She fled Laos with her family when she was a baby, crossed the Mekong on her mother’s back, was fed opium to keep from crying, lived in the refugee camps in Thailand, and landed in America on a silver metal bird in the mid 1980s. She is a visual artist in Minnesota, who works within multiple genres of photography. Her received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University.