I Just Need Another Minute 2021
Ten-Hour Video Installation
What happens to our attention in the span of a minute? Of a lifetime? This project consists of one-minute, hand-held shots documenting an ongoing habit of walking to the same place at the same time of day — Lake Michigan, Late afternoon. The walk shapes the video, and the video shapes the walk.
This is a ten-hour video installation that begins and ends with the opening and closing of the gallery. This duration makes it impossible for any one person to consume the video in one sitting. Instead, it offers the viewer material for a more patient, enduring, and minute form of attention — one that is able to perceive changes in nature at its own pace.
[This is a site-specific praxis. The sample link provided is a 4 minute trailer. For COCA I propose to realize this work based on the local site and environment of the exhibition.]
Materials: Color Video, Aspect Ratio 16:9, Stereo Sound, Projector, Projection Screen.
Paradise on Google Earth 2021
Split-screen Video, 07:10min
Premieres at Earth Day Art Model Festival
April 2021, Indiana University
Is there paradise on earth? If so, how many? A Google Earth walk through the cities of Valparaíso, Chile and Valparaiso, Indiana, USA, are displayed side-by-side, along with sound recordings from the two cities. The sound and image of Valparaíso, Chile is represented by the left audio-visual channel, while the sound and image of Valparaiso, Indiana is represented by the right. The two walks follow one set of directions: a turn left in one city, corresponds to a turn left in the other city.
As an urban city of the Global South collides with a residential suburb of the Global North, two contrasting worlds merge into a single, dreamlike landscape. As the cursor navigates its way through two Valparaiso cities, it also navigates through their geopolitical, cultural, and social landscapes. How does one paradise compare with the other? Does one paradise change our view of the other?
Knotted Lines 2021
Fiber-Metal Installation / Intervention
Solo Show
SITE Galleries, Chicago, USA
February 15-March 6 2021
Do good fences make good neighbors? Knotted Lines engages the boundary as both a site of conflict and connection through the material ambiguity of hard and soft. As wool twists into barbed wire and aluminium unfolds into cloth, what feels soft starts to look hard and what feels hard begins to look soft. In the lines of wool and metal, tactile and visual perceptions of permeability and impermeability are disentangled, to be re-entangled in ways that at once hold together and apart.
Over the three-week course of the exhibition, seven ongoing interventions were developed in collaboration with Irene Hsiao and Jonas Sun, provoking the charged process of drawing boundaries with fiber, metal, and the body.
Materials: Wool, 8-ft Aluminium Poles, Aluminium Mesh, Human Bodies, Concrete.
Note: The text above was written by the Artist. No modification was made by COCA.
Maya Nguyen
Vietnam
Maya Nguyen (b. 1996) is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist who works with sound, image, and the body, in natural and constructed environments — be it by documenting the same location at the same time of day for several weeks, by performing multiple durational interventions on a physical installation, or by manipulating the rhythm of spatialized sound and image. At the core of her work is the belief that by pushing our embodied senses to the edge we can, once again, become sensitive to the power dynamics that structure our environments. For Nguyen, climate change, nation-state borders, and colonial histories are interlinked human practices that cannot be separated from one another. In her own practice, she begins within this entanglement and forges ways to be that are at once physical, poetic, and political. She holds a BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, and is an MFA candidate in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.