Alison Nguyen

Alison Nguyen is a New York-based artist working across video, installation, sculpture, and performance. She received her M.F.A in Visual Art from Columbia and her B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University.

Nguyen is a 2023-2024 Studio Artist at the Whitney Independent Study Program (New York, NY). Her most recent solo exhibition was presented in 2023 at MIT List Center for Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA). In December 2023, her first institutional solo screening will be presented at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Alison Nguyen’s practice combines the particulars of the personal with an exploration into broader forces of history, particularly those entwined with technology. Weaving together approaches of performance, documentary research, and narrative, her work is infused with incisive analysis, humor, and philosophical undertones. Nguyen’s installations and sculptures are material counterparts to her moving image work which conflate distinctions such as the virtual and the real.

Collage and the readymade are recurring techniques in her work. In past projects, Nguyen has borrowed user-generated, 3-D-modeled objects, which often appear in video games, and employed found footage to trace the evolution of consumer-produced media (from early home videos to YouTube vlogging). The artist has also explored visual parallels between dessert commercials and the aesthetic embellishment of tragedy in news reporting, sometimes dubbed “disaster porn.” In her critically acclaimed body of work surrounding computer-generated woman Andra8, Nguyen has enlisted motion-capture technology (which maps the artist’s movements onto an animation in real time) to outsource live-broadcast virtual lecture performances to her gig-working avatar, Andra8.

Recently, Nguyen has taken a closer look at the relationship between political conditions and technological developments. These subjects are brought to bear in her most recent work, history as hypnosis (2023), alongside a related print and video sculpture. Drawing on the cinematic tropes of science-fiction and road films, history as hypnosis surfaces themes of alienation, assimilation and refusal, centering on characters and narratives that, as the artist observes, are often “omitted from history and the screen.”

The film follows three women programmed by artificial intelligence whose memories from their previous existence have been erased. In search of a man named “X,” the trio venture from the California desert to gas stations, gritty strip malls, starchitect-designed buildings, and underground enclaves. Interweaving subtle references to past geopolitical violence associated with the US war in Vietnam, the works on view offer a complex take on how memory, consciousness, and historical narratives merge into a shared cultural imaginary, which is produced, and reinforced, through cinematic images.

Nguyen’s work has been presented at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, The Everson Museum, The Dowse Art Museum, The International Studio & Curatorial Program, AC Gallery Beijing, Half Gallery, Signs and Symbols, La Kaje, Hartnett Gallery, and The University of Oklahoma, among others. Her screenings include: e-flux, Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Oberhausen, CPH:DOX, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, True/False Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, The Jewish Museum, and Microscope Gallery.

She has received residencies and fellowships from the International Studio & Curatorial Program, The Institute of Electronic Arts, BRIC, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center, Signal Culture, and Vermont Studio Center. She has been awarded grants from the NYFA Artist Fellowship in Film/Video, NYSCA, Wave Farm’s Media Art Assistance Fund, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and The New York Community Trust. In 2018 Alison Nguyen was featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Her work has been reviewed in publications such as e-flux, The Brooklyn Rail, and Art Papers.