| Biography | Artist Statement I Inventory Catalogue | Artists Represented | Nam Nguyen

Biography

“The body of metamorphosis knows neither metaphor nor meaning.  Meaning does not slip from one form to the other, it is the forms which slip directly from one to the other, as in dance movements, or oracular prophecies.”  -Jean Baudrillard

What is the relationship between my strange encounters I experience as I walk through urban spaces?  How can the images I create antagonize to refresh one’s vision of the ordinary?  These are the central questions that provide the tension necessary for the production of my art.

In the spirit of meandering, I am mindful of the importance of  intuition and self-awareness that may result in arriving upon illuminating meditations.  From my meanderings I take digital photographs that serve as the initial step, the collecting of raw materials for a process of analysis through systematic mediation.  Through acts mediation, tracing, drawing, digital printing etc., I deconstruct and reconstruct the image.  Light, color, composition, etc. are explored through an analysis, a working through of the photographic image.   My process of analyzing the image paradoxically denatures the image to an unrecognizable state.  In this form they act as signposts of a poetic and mindful connection, pointing to an atmosphere of suspended reality. 

My practice as emerges from the artistic tradition of Realism, with Photo-Realist artists, Richard Estes and Chuck Close, as pivotal figures in the tradition of analytical image making.  As I am, like many of my contemporaries, are working in the wake of past achievements, ie. post-conceptual, post-minimal, and post-modern art, I am attempting to define in my work a post-photorealist practice.  In that I continue an analytical mode, a methodological process, that now sustains itself through examining a images that cannot fully be understood as “photographic” as it was in the time of PhotoRealism.  We are in a period of the digital image, that is created with manipulation tools accessible on a mass level.  The image no longer hides within the magic of chemical development but is profanely displayed on LCD screens on all manner of devices.  In short the analytical mode of image realism is no longer interested in fidelity to photographic objectivity.  Rather, a
post-photorealist practice seeks to investigate the metamorphic nature of images.  The image is not approached as a thing unto itself, but as an invisibility that passes through and exists in a fluid network of  mediums.