The Hill School’s Boyer Gallery is excited to host the first exhibit of the 2024-2025 School year, Altogether Elsewhere by Hong-Bich Huynh Vernon. An Opening Reception will take place in the Boyer Gallery in the Center For The Arts (766 Beech St.) on Friday, September 13, 2024, from 6-8 p.m. This event is free and open to the public. 

The exhibit will be on display from September 13 to October 11, 2024. Other than the Opening Reception, access to the gallery is by appointment only. Please call 610-705-1040 in advance to request an appointment.  

About the Artist 
Hong-Bich Huynh Vernon was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, in 1960. When Saigon fell in April 1975, she and her family fled as refugees to the United States. Hong-Bich holds an M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she received the Neill/Rubin and Kathleen Bunkey Frame Memorial Awards. She also earned a B.A. from Webster University and an A.A. from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. In her paintings, prints, and installations, Hong-Bich explores the psychological dimensions of exile. Her work challenges the shifting, fragmented memories of being uprooted and examines the ongoing consequences of forced displacement. Hong-Bich has lived and exhibited her work internationally in Malaysia, France, Sri Lanka, and Switzerland and attended artist residencies in France, Italy, and Japan. Her most recent exhibitions have been in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Freeman Gallery, and the Marginal Utility Gallery. Hong-Bich currently resides in West Chester, Pa. 

About the Exhibition 
In this exhibition, artist Hong-Bich Huynh Vernon explores the multifaceted concept of Altogether Elsewhere, delving into the fractured realities of forced migration and exile. Born in Vietnam and having fled to the United States as a refugee in 1975, Hong-Bich's personal history deeply informs her work. Working intuitively from a process rooted in her materials, Hong-Bich creates a visual language that respects the long-standing traditions of painting and printmaking. She finds beauty and poetry in the translucency and fragility of handmade paper, contrasting it with the resilience and warmth of bamboo stalks.  This interplay of textures and properties mirrors the complexity of the refugee experience - vulnerability intertwined with strength. She often reuses, rearranges, and reframes previous works, combining them into new ideas that reflect the fluid nature of identity and belonging. Fraught with limitation and possibility, Hong-Bich's mixed media paintings and prints evoke a precarious life on the margin, reflecting the experience of displacement and reinvention. Hong-Bich illuminates the universal human resilience in forging connections amidst upheaval through this artistic exploration. Constructing freely between the figurative and the abstract, Hong Bich's work resonates with the complex experience of displacement, examining the ongoing consequences of forced migration and the need to re-establish oneself - an outsider now on the inside, yet still looking out while looking in.