Contrapuntals, Intel Lastierre and Vy Ngo

Exhibition Dates: Sept 25 - Oct 24, 2026 Opening Reception: September 25, 7-10 pm Artist talk: October 15th, 6-8 pm with Sabrina Mooroogen Ph.D., Equity Through Arts Gallery Hours: Friday and Saturday, 12-6 pm and by appointment Contrapuntals: New Work by Intel Lastierre and Vy Ngo Contrapuntals takes its title from music, where two or more independent melodic lines unfold simultaneously. Rather than merging into a single voice, each retains its own integrity, creating moments of harmony, tension, and dissonance. The exhibition adopts this structure as a way of thinking about the conversation between the work of Intel Lastierre and Vy Ngo. Each artist approaches questions of history, power, and identity from a distinct perspective, generating meaning through proximity and difference. Rather than seeking resolution, Contrapuntals asks what becomes possible when distinct voices remain in conversation. Lastierre's paintings draw viewers into fluid, flesh-like forms that hover between body and landscape, where layered surfaces and shifting contours evoke histories that resist fixed boundaries. Through these visceral compositions, she examines colonialism as an ongoing structure that continues to shape the modern world, with a particular focus on the Philippines and the United States. Her work gives material form to histories of violence, transformation, and survival while tracing how imperial systems informed ideas of democracy, progress, knowledge, and human value, producing enduring inequalities of power and belonging. Moving through histories of conquest, labor, language, technology, and representation, she reveals how practices of classification, extraction, and control persist within contemporary institutions. At the same time, her paintings recover suppressed histories and cultural memory, foregrounding resistance, resilience, and the possibility of imagining beyond inherited systems of power. Ngo's work likewise begins with close observation. Emerging from a recent journey through central Vietnam, her paintings and installations draw on fragments of architecture, historical imagery, and found materials to examine how successive occupations continue to shape the country's landscape and cultural identity. Her work considers mission civilisatrice, the French imperial doctrine that framed colonial rule as a civilizing project, exposing how architecture, language, education, and class reinforced imperial authority while masking violence and dispossession. French, Japanese, and American occupations each transformed Vietnam without erasing what came before. Instead, these phenomena accumulated within its cities, landscapes, and collective memory. Ngo asks what it means to inhabit a place marked by overlapping empires and who determines which histories are preserved as heritage and which remain visible only as damage. Together, Lastierre and Ngo approach empire not as a completed historical episode but as a living set of structures, stories, and material conditions that continue to shape everyday life. Emerging from distinct histories and geographies, their work reveals how power endures in landscapes, institutions, and memory while also illuminating the persistence of resistance and cultural survival. Like independent melodic lines, their practices do not resolve into a single narrative. Ultimately, Contrapuntals invites viewers to listen across differences, recognizing that meaning often emerges through the sustained encounter of distinct, unresolved voices.