Featured Artists: Ame Morrison and Nina Vichayapai.
Long Way Home
WVC MAC Gallery
May 2—June 20, 2025
First Friday Receptions May 2 and June 6, 5:00—7:00
The artists will put on a workshop on May 2 will have students and guests working with mediums from their show, including portrait photography and multimedia collage.
Ame Morrison and Nina Vichayapai: Long Way Home
In their multi-media installation Long Way Home, Portland artists Ame Morrison and Nina Vichayapai collaborate to explore their experiences of otherness after traveling along the highways of the United States. Their installation, which includes a large-scale soft sculpture of a car, family archives, photography and video, reimagines the road as a site for possibility and pleasure beyond the white hetero-patriarchal culture that has dominated travel narratives in the American West.
Exhibition Statement:
On the road, one horizon bleeds into another. Forests dissipate into open land. Mountains melt into plains and then back into mountains. In Long Way Home, Ame and Nina Vichayapai trace their personal histories and migrational lineages within the Western United States.
Nina’s memories of childhood are framed by a car window. She finds inspiration in the way her parents adopted the American pastime of road trips while being unapologetically Asian, as they traveled with their rice cooker while barely speaking English. For her Thai immigrant family, road trips were an important way to situate themselves within the American landscape.
For Ame, movement makes room for shapeshifting. They have found intermittent liberation from gender categories through road-based travel and car living. For them, being transitory is analogous to transgender identity.
At the unlikely intersection of these experiences, Ame and Nina have collaborated on Long Way Home to explore otherness on United States highways. Through soft sculptures, family archives, photography and their friendship, they reimagine the road as a site for possibility and pleasure beyond the white hetero-patriarchal culture that has dominated travel narratives in the American West.
