MFA Review Exhibition, Open Critique, New Work and more updates

The title of my MFA Midway exhibition

So it has been quite sometime since the last time I updated my blog. Amid this crazy season of exhibitions, reviews, working, etc. I finally decided to write something about the past few months and what's been going on in my studio recently. (Please bare with me for a long post)


Summer came to an end, August kicked in with a new semester and I became a second year grad student. My mother got back to Vietnam after spending nearly 3 months in the US with me. We traveled quite a bit when she was here. I had a good 2-week-long-vacation when I took my mother to New York, Washington D.C., Bethlehem (PA), Niagara Falls, and Boston. We had a lot of fun and I got to visit 13 museums in the course of 16 days. It was the best vacation I'd had in a while. Anyway, since earlier in the summer, I started my new body of work, shifting to a more installation-like kind of work. This is to prepare for my Midway Advancement to Candidacy Exhibition at the beginning of November. The exhibition is to showcase what I've been working on this past year and to prove that I'm worthy of continuing in the program and get my MFA Candidate status.

At the beginning of the fall semester, I showed some of the new work to my professors and got some good feedback on it. Right now I'm just finishing the few last details and getting ready for my biggest show this year. The exhibition will be "Recurring Dreams" and run from Nov. 2-19 in Student Galleries South, Jot Travis Building. Reception is Nov. 12 from 5pm-8pm. The only thing I could say about it right now is that I've put in a lot of work for this exhibition and I hope it would live up to my vision and expectation. Here are just few closed up shots on some of the new work. More updates on the exhibition will come soon.

This October I had an MFA group exhibition and an open critique with other grads in the program as well. Seven featured works from Bahared Farahani, Mahsan Ghazianzad, Konah Zebert, Tom Drakulich, DePaul Vera, Cullen Wegman, and I. The show received positive feedback from both faculty and visitors on the opening reception. I was grateful for all the love and support I received for my work.

My piece in this exhibition is an extension of my previous body of work, where I talked more about my experience encountering cultural differences while being in America. It is an installation where I attempt to recreate the confusion and overwhelming feelings I had with the English language as a freshman few years ago when I first came to this country. Some elements of this installation are my experiment with different art approach where I tried activating the space and asked my viewers to interact with my piece. Some works better than the other, but overall I was happy with how it turned out. Here are some pictures of the installation and people's interaction with it during the reception.

 

Words

Scrolls, Relief, Letterpress

Dimension Varies

2015

 Another good news I want to share is that this exhibition is going to be featured in the gallery at University of Nevada, Las Vegas later this November until January of 2016. My graduate director, prof. Tamara Scronce, has been working really hard to help us secure this opportunity. We also will travel to Las Vegas for an artist talk and closing reception in late January 2016. I'll post more information when the time comes. But this is an exciting news that I was really proud that my work will travel to another university be in their gallery for two full months. It was a lot of work getting this installation together and I cannot thank my BFA fellow Erin Wohletz and my housmate, Nhan Pham, enough for all their time and support (especially when I wasn't in my right mind trying to finish all the work for all these exhibitions.)

If you are in town this November, I hope to see you at the reception of my MFA Midway exhibition, 5pm-8pm on Thursday, November 12, at Jot Travis Building, University of Nevada, Reno. The show runs from November 2-19 so if you can't be there, please stop by another time to check out my work. I'll post update on my blog following my reception and critique with my MFA Thesis Committee.

Please check back for more updates in the future!