This Land is Your Land

New Victimhood by Diane Severin Nguyen

Diane Severin Nguyen is a Vietnamese American artist born in 1990 in Carson, California. She works with found objects and organic matter to make amalgam sculptures that craft the images in her photographs and time-based media. Her pictures evoke an “architecture of emotions,” but also fundamental bodily functions. Over the years, Nguyen has experimented with chromogenic prints, capturing small-scale matters at a close range. Some of the materials she works with are plant-based, coagulating, metallic, and wet. Transient prosthetic lighting, such as the glow of sunset, an iPhone flash, battery-powered LEDs, or fire, is also used so that the camera intervenes moments before these temporary arrangements of her models and their lighting change. As a result, she captures an ineffable moment during a state of transformation, often of the moment of instability before the matter falls apart. Additionally, her short films expand her photographic moments into historical contexts, such as portraying trash-inundated landscapes in Vietnam in her film Tyrant Star. Nguyen currently works between Los Angeles and New York and has had many solo and duo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and New York.


What happens to plastic once we put it in our recycling bins? Each year, hundreds of thousands of tons of US plastic are shipped around the world to nations such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia for the labor-intensive process of recycling. However, much of this plastic is not actually recycled and eventually ends up in our oceans. The objects we see in this photograph might be fishing nets and plastic ties; they are unspecific in a way that evokes an emotional response about the way humans and nature interact. The bright blues suggest bioluminescence, which is sometimes used by animals as a form of self-defense. Both beautiful and a signal of threat, the effect might make us wonder just who the predators are.



 

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