Vo Vo | Of ev rywh re and n wh re
April 30 - May 31, 2025
First Thursday: May 1, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday, May 14 at 5:30 pm
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to announce Of ev ryh re and n wh re, the gallery’s first solo presentation of works by Vo Vo. Vo creates sculptures and textile-based works that reflect on the dehumanizing internationalism of a globalized economy, climate change, media streams, social forces, geographic displacement, erasure and the ongoing genocide of a people.
The exhibition title, Of ev ryh re and n wh re, is drawn from a quote about adult ‘third culture kids,’ for whom home is “everywhere and nowhere”. Reflecting on their own identity, experience and history as an immigrant, third culture kid, and child of refugees from the Vietnam War, Vo’s installation draws attention to feelings of displacement and the inability to find a place to settle in the world. The exhibition contemplates the possible futures of people who lose their homes, their lands, associated nation-states, or are displaced from the localities where they and their families are from.
Allusions to marginalized bodies, the policing of movement, and imperial and colonial forces, even evident online, are found throughout the exhibition. In Vo’s weavings, the pendulum of a two-party political system swings back and forth; hands enter and emerge from screens; the artist, represented as a horse, navigates a city. Bisecting the gallery, a bench with elements of hostile architecture rises from the floor, its structure both impeding and directing the movement of viewers.
Against these forces, opportunities for community-building and healing emerge – a bed for rest and a table where we can gather appear; a figure steps through a door; the end of the bench offers a poem and a place to sit in contemplation. Creating the opportunity to explore different zones of safety, Vo invites viewers to come together and navigate the current political climate.
Vo Vo (they/them) explores support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled communities. They are editor, educator, curator, artist, and musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Singapore, Croatia, Mexico, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Vietnam, Sweden, Malaysia, and the States. In their transdisciplinary art, they work in textiles, embroidery, audio, video, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, challenge histories and realities of imperialism, white supremacy and colonization.