Fri, Oct 7, 2016, 6 pm –Tue, Nov 8, 2016, 8 pm Concourse Gallery Gallery Exhibition Image MCAD is pleased to be highlighting the work of four Twin Cities-based artists known for their striking images that suggest an understanding of or intimacy with the communities they photograph. But that is where the similarities end. The artists themselves have significantly different relationships to immigrant communities, which are informed by their personal histories and experiences. This exhibition puts these artists’ diverse philosophical and methodological approaches in dialogue with one another and the gallery space at MCAD. Their varying explorations of cultural assimilation and attitudes toward representational responsibility tie directly into the formal aesthetic choices they make, photographic history, and the current political climate. 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 who works within multiple genres of photography. Selma Fernández Richter is a photographer and visual storyteller specializing in portraiture. Originally for Mexico, she has been documenting recent immigrants to the Twin Cities who have been displaced from their country of origin by war, violence, and famine. Her project The Ache for Home is a meditation on her own experience of adapting to a new life and home in Minnesota. Mohamud Mumin’s passion in photography lies in his relentless pursuit to harness its immense capacity to facilitate dialogue across barriers and cultures. He has devoted much of his attention to documenting Somalis In North America, in particular the youth engaged in their communities as they forge a new life in their new homes. Steve Ozone is a third generation Asian American. Trained as a photojournalist, Ozone has pursued several photographic and documentary film projects that explore where the conflicts lie between the idealism of attaining “The American Dream” and the reality of being the “other.”