CATHERINE G. MURPHY GALLERY
St. Catherine University
2004 Randolph Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105
Reverberating Bodies
(Two Solo Exhibits) Christine Nguyen & Dao Strom
February 5–March 20, 2022
Curated by Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn
Virtual Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 16, 6:30-7:30pm. Join us for a discussion with artists Dao Strom and Christine Nguyen, moderated by curator Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn. Please RSVP here by Monday, February 14. A Zoom link will be emailed to participants in advance of the event.
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This exhibition brings together the work of multimedia artists Christine Nguyen and Dao Strom. Inspired by the interconnectedness of nature and the cosmos, Christine Nguyen’s lyrical, luminous and large-scale paintings are paired with a suspended mobile of hand-built ceramic forms that reference diatoms and atoms.
Strom describes herself as an artist “who works in three ‘voices’—written, sung, visual—to contemplate hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories.” She combines poetry, music, imagery and video to “explore themes of displacement, hauntings, mythos, memory, and echo.” Strom is St. Catherine University’s 2021-2022 Amy Marie Sears Memorial Visiting Artist.
With each body of work installed separately across two gallery wings, the curator envisions a rich dialogue between the work of the artists. Ánh-Hoa Thị Nguyễn explains: “both artists push the participants of their art to explore parts of their interior worlds that are intangible, ambiguous and ethereal. I am excited to see how this conversation develops and evolves.”
More about the Artists:
IG: @seamoonshe
Website: christinenguyen.art
IG: @herandthesea
Website: daostrom.com
Artwork by Christine Nguyen
Traveler’s Ode: A Triptych (by Dao Strom)
Traveler’s Ode: A Triptych (by Dao Strom)
Artist/Exhibit Statement: In this exhibit of sound and poetry, Dao Strom uses three manifestations of “voice”—poetic, sung, visual—to explore themes of displacement, hauntings, mythos, memory, and echo. These “song-poems” find their seeds in diasporic longing but are also an evocation—and invocation—of voice itself as a mythopoetic space for inhabitants of the in-between.
These songs cross countries and cultures. They began as “voicings” of sầu, which is a Vietnamese word for a particular kind of ache; a sorrow held deep and privately. They are sung from one shore to another, messages sent east to west and back west to east. The narrator of these songs is a lone woman traveler, a traveler who has been traveling a long while now. She travels through memory as well as through history. On the road behind her unwind ribbons of forgetting, tendrils of re-membering: a lost country, forgotten fathers, distant mothers, lost poetry, the long echoes of past wars now distorted yet still repeating… Sometimes the woman is a ghost wearing the mourning color of white; sometimes she is a flightless figure in black wings; a displaced daughter of the fairy bird-mother of legend. This winged daughter, though grounded, never fully lands. As an inheritor of this mythos of wings, she has been a child of circumstance, a witness, an exile, a diasporic being outcast (or freed) into hybridity; non-belonging. She sees history and she questions it, sometimes laments it, asks why we do not sing of it, asks also how do we sing beyond it. The woman-traveler sings to break the silence and in hopes the messages she has harbored out of distant places might now be heard in the new places she passes through. She sings also to vibrate new bodies of memory and feeling into the spaces she passes through. She makes poems into songs into fleeting, liminal homes.