Opening Reception – Saturday, June 26, 4-7PM: RSVP for a 1-hour time slot HERE. Due to our limited capacity, timed entry reservations are required to attend the opening reception. Please sign up for only one time slot, and your arrival to the gallery must be within the hour you have selected. Please read our COVID Courtesy Code prior to your visit – face coverings are required for all visitors, even if you are vaccinated.
After opening day, the gallery will be open regular hours, Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6PM, and reservations will not be required.
The works that comprise Tammy Nguyen’s solo exhibition Freehold are inspired by the artist’s research and writing about Forest City, a tax free, man-made island in Johor, Malaysia, located along the Singapore Strait and adjacent to the Strait of Malacca–-one of the busiest trade conduits in the world. With the goal of attracting visitors and investors, Forest City follows a utopian model, proclaiming that it “will be a smart and green futuristic city,” and through the combination of geography and design will “create an ideal, idyllic and technology-driven living and working space ecosystem.” When the artist herself posed as an investor to visit the island, her guide informed her that there was “no climate change here.” Malaysia, he explained, does not suffer from natural disasters like its neighboring countries, making it one of the best places to retire in the world. Nguyen’s rendering of Forest City considers the provocative nature of this statement to imagine it as a place where no change takes place because all the goals of health and wealth have been met. It has reached a capital ideal, so change is no longer needed.
The exhibition brings together three new bodies of work: two series of paintings and a series of twelve collaged prints, each marking an hour on a traditional clock. A flag, in material and photographed form, frames the exhibition, proposing an ideology that underpins all of the works. Considered by the artist as a “perfect flag,” it is composed of a white circle in the center for the sacred sun, surrounded by 12 evenly spaced, alternating stripes in blue and green, representing the unchanging land and water.
Within the paintings and collages, Nguyen presents the visual tropes to which Forest City seems to aspire: the Marlboro cowboy for rugged individualism, a spa woman for leisure, and a standing ape which alludes to King Kong and the new movie studios located in Forest City, an area regionally similar to where the movie was originally filmed. Crucially Nguyen’s works remove the hierarchy between the subject and background, merging figures with their environments. The iconic images are broken down by tropical flora, abstraction of shapes, and the movement of her marks. Together, the works in Freehold propose the fiction of a stabilized geographic realm to address the fantasy, arrogance, and shortcomings of human ambition.
BIO:
Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects. Born in San Francisco, Nguyen received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007. The year following, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked with a ceramics company for three years thereafter. Nguyen received an MFA from Yale in 2013 and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014. She has exhibited at the Rubin Museum, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, the Bronx Museum, and Five Myles among others. Her work is included in the collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University and represented by Hesse Flatow in New York City.
Image above: Tammy Nguyen, Man (detail), 2021. Watercolor, vinyl paint, pastel, and metal leaf on paper stretched over panel, 60 x 36 inches.
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This exhibition is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Stephen Levin, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Select Equity Group Foundation, many individuals and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon’s programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and with generous support from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., and Exploring The Arts. In-kind donations are provided by Materials for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs/NYC Department of Sanitation/NYC Department of Education.
Smack Mellon would like to extend a special thanks to all of the individuals, foundations, and businesses who have contributed to the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
