Sung Tieu, Lex Brown, and Alison Nguyen

The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce its Spring 2023 exhibition and programming schedule. The galleries feature solo exhibitions by Sung Tieu, Lex Brown, and Alison Nguyen. 

Sung Tieu: Civic Floor
April 4–July 16, 2023
Hayden Gallery

With Civic Floor, the MIT List Visual Arts Center presents the US debut of recently co-commissioned works by German-Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu. Tieu employs sculpture, drawing, sound, video, and installation to examine a wide range of subjects in which social or political power is articulated through sensory and psychological realms. Perception is a key node in Tieu’s work as she elaborates the often alienating effects of sound, architecture, design, and language. Working across various media, Tieu crafts a spatial narrative in each of her exhibitions that reflects her research into bureaucratic systems and their affective spaces as well as her lived experience with them.

At the List Center, Tieu’s exhibition Civic Floor features a suite of abstract steel sculptures imposing in substance and weight, which reference spaces designed for detention and require the viewer’s aerial perspective. A new series of tablet-like plaster reliefs, derived from asylum petitions, relate the activities of administration and the raw material of architecture (i.e. plaster walls) while making clear, in bounded square millimeters, the narrow parameters within which an asylum-seeker’s persuasive story might exist. With these objects, as well as in a new ambient sound piece, Tieu invites viewers to consider space and its allowances—in formal, sculptural terms that entreat the histories of Minimalism, and in socio-political terms that echo to the title’s invocation of citizenship and the rights it confers.

Sung Tieu: Civic Floor is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator.

Lex Brown: Carnelian
April 4–July 16, 2023
Reference Gallery

Spanning video, sculpture, drawing, writing, performance, and the podcast 1-800-POWERS, Lex Brown’s incisive artworks confront pressing social conditions of our time, from gentrification and greenwashing to police violence, but do so through an irreverent and sometimes jarring use of humor. Steeped in satire and slapstick, her works borrow the visual tropes and intonations of pop culture, social media, and corporate branding.
 
As a central performer in her videos and performance works, Brown mimics and lampoons these sources in order to illuminate the absurdities, contradictions, and exploitative designs of late-capitalism and its social constructs. Brown also savvily observes how our relationships to various media—both as consumers and, increasingly, “users” and content producers (all subject to the invisible sway of algorithms)—contours our lived experience. In past installations, for example, Brown utilized motion sensors to cue videos and illuminate drawings in response to a spectator’s path through the exhibition, viewers have accessed sound installations by telephone, and the artist’s poetry has scrolled on the monitors of closed-circuit televisions.
 
The List Center exhibition is the Philadelphia-based artist’s first museum solo presentation and debuts Brown’s multi-channel video installation Carnelian (2023) alongside a group of new paintings.

Lex Brown: Carnelian is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.  

List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen
February 23–June 26, 2023
Bakalar Gallery

The cultural implications of technology are a primary concern in Alison Nguyen’s practice. Spanning the moving picture, installation, performance, and text, her works reflect on how images are produced and consumed—whether in film, advertising, or virtual spaces online. Recently, the artist has taken a closer look at the relationship between political conditions and technological developments while also considering the psychological effects of mainstream digital media on its consumers. These subjects are brought to bear in the works on view in her List Center exhibition, which premieres a three-channel installation of Nguyen’s first live-action film, history as hypnosis (2023), alongside a related print and video sculpture.

Drawing on the cinematic tropes of science-fiction, Western, and road films, history as hypnosis surfaces themes of alienation and assimilation and centers characters and narratives that, as the artist observes, are often “omitted from history and the screen.” The film follows three women programmed by artificial intelligence whose memories from their previous existence have been erased as the trio venture from the California desert to gas stations, gritty strip malls, starchitect-designed buildings, and underground enclaves. Interweaving subtle references to past geopolitical violence associated with the US war in Vietnam, the works on view offer a complex take on how memory, consciousness, and historical narratives merge into a shared cultural imaginary, which is produced, and reinforced, through cinematic images.

List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.

Related programming
Artist discussion: Sound collaboration with Lex Brown and Samuel Beebe
Friday, April 28, 5pm EST

Film screening and artist discussion with Alison Nguyen
Thursday, May 11, 6pm EST

Virtual panel discussion: How Structures Govern with Keller Easterling, Eve Meltzer, and Sung Tieu
Wednesday, May 24, 1pm EST