Skowmon Hastanan’s light boxes contain carefully layered images and texts that tell parallel botanical and human narratives, based on traveler’s tales, cross-cultural mythology, and current events. The first box was inspired by the artist’s love of the orchids that fill her home and connect her family to Thailand. The Arrival: Purple Glory explores how orchids traveled the world as packing material on slave ships and were then unloaded in new lands where they took hold. Nari Pala, Woman Mango Fruit Tree, is based on a sailor’s tale about a garden of magical fruit trees bearing beautiful women, that was recorded by by 9th-century Persian writers, 13th-century Chinese writer Tu Han, and the 19th-century Thai poet Sunthorn Bhoo. This box explores the ways that popular culture, advertising and the sex-trade associate women with exotic flowers. Eighty-Eight Pineapple Pickers is a reminder of the current struggles over immigration. It is based on a recent incident involving migrant agricultural laborers who were recruited from Thailand to work in Arizona, but then were redirected to harvest pineapples in Hawaii, where they were underpaid and poorly treated.

Skowmon Hastanan came to New York with her family at the age of ten, and later received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her MTA Arts for Transit commission for the 233rd Street Station of the 2/5 subway line, entitled A Secret Garden: There’s No Place Like Home, pays homage to the New York Botanical Garden. There she found sanctuary during her high school years, when volunteering in the Garden’s Herbarium and visits to the Enid Haupt Conservatory eased the pangs of homesickness she felt for tropical Thailand. Her design for the station’s faceted glass panels was exhibited in Bronx Bound, at Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx NY, and is scheduled to be installed this fall. She completed a Percent for Art Program commission for PS 228’s Early Childhood Center, Elmhurst, NY in 2001, and has done temporary public art installations for Chinatown In/Flux, organized by the Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, PA; and banners along Canal Street organized by Godzilla for Art in General, New York, NY. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Jamaica, NY; Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos, Bronx, NY; and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; and will be included in Global Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in March 2007.
www.skowmon.com