Kenny Nguyen: Home/land

Sugarlift Gallery is pleased to present Kenny Nguyen: Home/land, opening from 6 pm to 8 pm on Thursday, February 16. This is the artist's first solo show with the gallery, and will be open through March 25. 

Tackling complex concepts of identity and displacement, Kenny Nguyen’s work is painting, textile, and sculpture all at once, achieved through a process honed by years of experimentation and exploration. In the studio, strips of silk are cut, pressed into paint, and resolutely collaged onto canvas to create a dynamic mosaic of texture and color. But it is not until the moment of installation that the work is truly finished, when Nguyen hand-sculpts the canvas onto the wall, transforming these materials once more into a light-catching topography of drapes and folds. For this installation, the artist has created his largest piece to date, covering the gallery’s back wall with an expansive, undulating gradient of silk. This work is rife with seeming contradiction - painting/sculpture, structured/pliable, permanent/transient - yet undeniably balanced. This push and pull that is at the heart of Nguyen’s practice, a direct reflection of the ideas with which he is grappling: Vietnamese/American, resident/immigrant, home/land. 

“This exhibition explores the dual concepts of home and homeland through diaspora experiences, identity, cultural material, and the process of reinvented space and boundaries. Home and homeland are the most hybrid and complex forms in Vietnamese culture. They have become an intra-verse in which memories of family, history, culture, politics, religion are densely interwoven.  This large-scale installation is the result of inward traveling and mapping identity.  It’s an extension of the concept of home/land far beyond seeing – an experience of space and place where both worlds exist.” - Kenny Nguyen