STATEMENT OF RESEARCH/ ARTIST
“Props, dissections, and deconstructions of home lay the foundation for Nancy Sayavong’s sculptural practice. Her architectural interventions are explorations of materiality and confirmations of how our built world is created. By uncovering what lies behind the drywall, she imagines an understanding of the embedded psychological spaces shaped by other architecture; those of cultural belief, written history, and social movements. What social habits inhabit private spaces and how does form inspire behavior? How does a home act to house trauma? Sayavong herself occupies a layered space: working as a professional custom architectural builder, as a daughter of working-class Laotian refugees, and as a queer body disguised within these normative realms. Her domestic de-constructions and additions wonder about spiritual and cultural morale and strategic property ownership- both so often connected to patterns of domination and control. “
-Written for Introductions by Renee Rhodes, Art Program Manager of Root Division, San Francisco. 2020.
Biography: (b. Seattle, WA) Sayavong’s works have been included at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, SOMArts Cultural Center, Oakland Museum of California, Verge Center for the Arts among others. Residencies include The Headlands Center for the Arts in (Sausalito, CA), Ali Youssefi Project in (Sacramento, CA), Cow House Studios in (Wexford, Ireland), and Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation in (Berkeley., CA). Sayavong received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018, and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014.
She currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA.