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Alison Nguyen: Irreversible Damage

Opening Reception: May 11th, 7-10 pm
Exhibition Dates: May 11th-18th, 2012
Hours: by appointment only, contact alison.c.nguyen@gmail.com
Location: The Oracle Club, 10-41 47th Ave., Long Island City, 11101

The newly opened Oracle Club in Long Island City, Queens presents Irreversible Damage, a solo exhibition of works by Flux Factory Artist-in-Residence Alison Nguyen, from May 11th-18th.

The site-specific arrangement of art is primarily comprised of Nguyen’s panoramic prints created with deceptively simple photographic devices such as plastic “toy” cameras and handmade pinhole cameras constructed from readymade objects. In the series Nguyen ignores the numbered frames of the film, treating the negative as a continuous image and bringing to light instances of time which fall outside the purview of conventional narrative form.

Nguyen’s in-camera multiple exposures reveal overlapping scenes; flickers of light; faces, shadows, and shades of color that at times merge in and out of abstraction. The stories told by each piece are slippery. They braid and unfold variously depending on where you stand in relation to the large, scroll-like prints which wrap around the corners and crevices of the space.

Cultural critic Brian Miller writes, “The clock is an unreliable narrator. In Alison Nguyen’s multi-layered narratives, it guides us to memories we’ve forgotten we ever had, to wonder wheels and wristwatches, to plates of unfinished breakfast and plaster saints, to luminous spaces somewhere outside of the demesnes of time. Like silent filmstrips loosed from the reel, Nguyen’s photographs dare us to form a story. But this plot we’ve been given is unmapped terrain; it is where the fiction slips away from the reality, where past cleaves from present to future…

…Most urgently, these beguilingly translucent images implore us to trace the material of our own lives; our findings are bound to be mutable. We can go in search of lost time, we may stand stolidly in the present or pine for the future, but Nguyen incisively seems to choose none of the above. If time is linear, then that line forms a circle; if it is a journey, then we are always en route. Perhaps it is nothing more than a trace, the faintest smear of lipstick lingering on a worn collar. We can only say what Nguyen shows us: that time exists; it is present, watchful, irreversible.”

About the Artist:
Alison Nguyen graduated from Brown University in 2009 with a B.A. in Literary Arts. Since, she has exhibited widely at both non-traditional and traditional venues including the The Tribeca Project Space, The Flux Factory, The Rogue Space, The Red Filter Gallery, 440 Gallery, The Target Gallery, The Westside Rifle & Pistol Range, and Gallery Hanahou. She has received awards from Mensa, Nikon, The Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, Brown University, and the New York Community Trust.

Alison Nguyen is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Flux Factory in Long Island City, where she balances her studio practice with art direction and design. Irreversible Damage is sponsored, in part, by Nguyen’s New York Community Trust fellowship through Flux Factory.

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