MIT List Visual Arts Center
List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen
Exhibition Period: 23 February - 25 June 2023
Address: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Bldg. E15, Atrium level, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, United States
"List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen”, a solo exhibition by artist Alison Nguyen at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explores cultural implications of technology. Nguyen’s works, including moving image, installation, performance, and text, critically examine how digital images are both produced and consumed in various contexts, from film to advertising and virtual spaces online.
Nguyen has taken a closer look at the relationship between political conditions and technological developments while also considering the psychological effects of mainstream digital media on its consumers. These subjects are brought to bear in the works on view in her first institutional solo exhibition at the List Center, which premieres a three-channel installation of Nguyen’s first live-action film, history as hypnosis (2023), alongside a related print and video sculpture. Drawing on the cinematic tropes of science-fiction, Western, and road films, history as hypnosis surfaces themes of alienation and assimilation and centers 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.
Learn more --
https://listart.mit.edu/exhibitions/list-projects-26-alison-nguyen
https://listart.mit.edu/calendar/graduate-student-talk-kartik-chandra
