Christine Nguyen
January 26 – March 1, 2008
Opening reception, Saturday, January 26, 6-8 p.m.
Michael Kohn Gallery
8071 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
323 658 8088
http://www.kohngallery.com
Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by emerging Los Angeles-based artist Christine Nguyen. Nguyen’s unique practice combines drawing with photography to create extraordinary, hidden worlds influenced by her personal memories, landscape imagery, and imagined visions. Using a variety of media and a series of photographic processes, Nguyen creates fantastical, large-scale installations, engulfing the viewer into an otherworldly vortex that fluctuates between representation and abstraction.
Nguyen’s installations propose an eco-conscious atmosphere that often features imaginary creatures inhabiting a murky, sea-like environment made up of trees, flowers, ephemeral organisms, and crystalline particles. The co-inhabitants socialize, cross-pollinate information and distribute resources amongst their recycled community. A recent drawing featured a giant botanical-like squid swallowing a whale-shaped universe made up of bionetworks and miniature cities. Nguyen’s multilayered structures speak of profound entities that exist outside the ecosphere of human discord and the mysterious ethers that seem to stretch from beyond earth’s permeable atmosphere. Nguyen sets a panorama of nebular expanse, slippery time, and infinite spectral light that could be perceived only in the immeasurable depths of a dream void or through interstellar outer space.
Christine Nguyen has been featured in solo exhibitions at UCLA Hammer Museum (2006) and 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles (2006). Group exhibitions include Uneasy Angel, Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers, Munich, (2007); Exquisite Crisis and Encounters, APA Institute, New York University (2007); Beyond- Photography: Photography in Contemporary Art, Armory Center For the Arts Pasadena, CA (2007); Taste, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2007); and Oscene, Laguna Museum of Art, Laguna Beach, CA (2004). In 2006, Ngyuen received the first Contemporary Collectors of Orange County Fellowship and in 2005 received a Professional Artist Fellowship by the Public Corporation of the Arts, Long Beach.
For further information or press materials please contact info@kohngallery.com
or 323.658.8088.
