Baker Artist Portfolios

Catherine Khamnouane (b. 1996, Dallas) is a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist and educator. She received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she returned as a faculty member. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at Towson University.

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My father was born in a country that never existed. Its name has been mangled and its borders have been redrawn. Its villages were rebuilt into specters of themselves. I was born in the aftershock of their migration to the sleepy suburbs of Dallas. A jungle landscape of peacocks and Buddhist temples was overwritten by vast, idyllic skies, strip malls, and Baptist churches. Since I can remember, this story loomed large over my life. It had mystery and intrigue, cast with heroes, villains, and comic relief. Around the dinner table, the line between fact and fiction blurred, and as I grew to recognize my own perceptual fallibility, I unearthed the seams left by my own mistranslations and misremembering. I wondered how much space existed between the truth and my idea of it, and the harder I tried to pin it down, the farther away it floated.

I couldn’t witness that change in real-time, but I looked back and saw how my memories had slowly warped and rusted. By doing so, they recorded the passage of time just as verdigris develops on copper, grass grows and withers, scars collect on skin. The evidence of time drives the internal logic of these works. Just like my world, these works exist “after-the-fact.” We’re left to decode the evidence left behind. It is within this “post-Event” world that I ask the viewer to find the seams: to discern between fact and fiction, between true and false, between authentic and counterfeit. What exactly happened? Who is to blame? These questions are maddening and any attempt at an answer provides no real satisfaction.

Through layers of abstraction, I attempt to reconstruct the narrative of an unknowable past through performative objects and material investigations. It recognizes war, conflict, and aggression as intrinsic aspects of humanity but also offers a counter: so are curiosity, a drive towards truth, and the capacity for hope. These works enlist the ecology of several symbols: including salt, corrosion, cotton, indigo, human hair. I ask the viewer to read deeply into what is presented. How was this sourced? Who grew that? What does this translate to? Is that real? What can be observed can be submitted as evidence.