Pao Houa Her’s photographic images are never quite what they seem. Between the artificially staged and the carefully documented, Her’s highly choreographed lens focuses on the plight of her people, the Hmong, cunningly giving frame to the deceit they continue to suffer as a displaced and disenfranchised minority in the USA. Her’s practice speaks to not only the complex political condition of post-conflict displacement, faced by countless people whose local involvement in the proxy wars of others comes at a great irrevocable loss, but also to the alienation and cultural deprivation they endure as a forever ‘refugee’ community, under constant threat of racism, poverty, and deportation. Her was five years old when her family fled the calamity of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, spending several years in Thai refugee camps before settling in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. It is there that one of the largest exiled Indigenous (Hmong) communities from Lao resides, a consequence of America’s proxy war. Memories of her elders and their longing for a homeland both compel and haunt the artist’s practice. The first Hmong to graduate with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, Pao Houa Her embraces illusion and delusion as resilience in her exploration of what it means to be a Hmong American.