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Chantala Kommanivanh is an emerging Laotian American artist based out of Chicago. Kommanivanh's work is inspired from old family photographs and found images representing his childhood and pivotal moments of his life. His work uses paint and loose canvas, often collage and layered with drawn and painted marks, areas of thick paint and thin stains of color to explore his experience as a member of a refugee family. There are glimpses of a displaced youth negotiating a new cultural landscape, family ties, and various aspects of identity and urban life in his work. His paintings combine colorful and sometimes aggressive abstraction with moments of sensitive photographic clarity...perhaps an appropriate analogy to an engaged life