i can't swim.

i can’t swim. is a new body of work created during a three-month residency at SUNY Purchase (Purchase, NY). This collection of work is a response to the memory of the American War in Vietnam. Tran Nguyen looks closely at public spaces of grief, such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s War Memorial (1982) and interrogates her own Vietnamese American identity, which is still defined by the war. In a series of looping videos and installations, Tran Nguyen depicts how trauma, retold, leads to passages of folklore. What happens when the instruction manual, on how to survive, gets lost in the trans-generational gap? What will we make of ourselves and what does it look like to search for purpose within our identities?

This solo exhibition is supported by SUNY Purchase Foundation's Windgate Artist-in-Residence fund. For more information and to visit the exhibition, please go to this link.

i can't swim is in collaboration with Alex Derwick and documentation by Keith Hebel for The Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery.