Join us for the opening reception for two concurrent solo exhibitions, Kenny Nguyen: The Divine Eye & Raheleh Filsoofi: At the Edge of Arrival.
Kenny Nguyen creates expansive, dimensional, mixed-media paintings that center ideas of cultural identity, displacement, and integration. Drawing from his background in fashion design, Nguyen has developed a distinctive technique that he describes as deconstructed paintings. Using torn strips of silk, Nguyen transforms the textile by dipping them into acrylic paint, layering onto canvas, and hanging them dynamically on the wall to construct new topographies with each installation.
The Divine Eye includes an evocative, large-scale installation that invites viewers to engage with the rich spiritual and cultural history of Vietnam through the lens of Caodaism, a syncretic religion rooted in the synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophies founded in Vietnam in the 1920s. This blending of influences mirrors the hybrid nature of Vietnam’s own history, where indigenous traditions intertwined with external forces—whether colonial, political, or cultural—shaped the nation’s identity. For the first time, his deconstructed paintings will take the form of columns reflecting the religion’s distinctive temple architecture which embodies the collision and coexistence of these worlds.
This exhibition speaks not only to the spiritual beliefs of Caodaism but also to the resilience and ongoing transformation of Vietnamese culture, both in Vietnam and across the world. Through Nguyen’s artwork, viewers are invited to look inward and outward, to witness the past’s impact on the present, and to consider the transformative power of heritage in shaping the future.
Raheleh Filsoofi: At the Edge of Arrival
Raheleh Filsoofi is an itinerant artist, feminist curator, and community advocate. Using clay and sound as her primary expressive mediums, her work revolves around themes of movement, immigration, and social activism. Her art disrupts the borders that exist between us and seeks a more inclusive world, illuminating and challenging policies and politics.
At the Edge of Arrival brings together a constellation of works—dust paintings, vessels, sound, and video—to explore migration, land, and memory from the perspective of a Middle Eastern immigrant woman living in the American South. In this exhibition, Filsoofi engages with the layered histories of place, the materials drawn from it, and a poetic dialogue between her own migration from Iran and the forced migration of enslaved Africans who arrived in Charleston. Through this lens, she reflects on our shared presence in the land—not through similarity, but through resonance across time, material, and memory.
Having lived and worked across nine Southern states over the last twenty years, Filsoofi’s experience informs her exploration of geography not only as a physical landscape but as a layered archive of labor, displacement, and survival. This exhibition is a poetic excavation, a mapping of arrival and absence, a listening for the sounds that persist in soil. It honors the people, plants, and stories rooted in this region, while asking: What connects us across difference? What remains at the edge of arrival?