List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen

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Two screens are situated at a right angle hanging in a room with an orange hue. On the left screen, three Asian women in white clothing look at one another. On the right screen a man gazes to the left.

Exhibition view: List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2023. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Location
Bakalar Gallery
Featured Artists
Alison Nguyen
Explore all artists who have exhibited at the List in our Artist Index.

The cultural implications of technology are a primary concern in Alison Nguyen’s practice. Spanning the moving image, installation, performance, and text, her works reflect on how digital images are produced and consumed—whether in film, advertising, or virtual spaces online. 

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 exposed visual parallels between dessert commercials and the aesthetic embellishment of tragedy in news reporting, sometimes dubbed “disaster porn.” And 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 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. 

Alison Nguyen (b. 1986), lives and works in New York. Her films have screened at e-flux, Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Oberhausen, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, Open City Documentary Festival, the Jewish Museum, and Microscope Gallery, among others. Her work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries including Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; the Dowse Art Museum, New Zealand; International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York; AC Gallery, Beijing; Half Gallery, Signs and Symbols, La Kaje, Hartnett Gallery, all New York; and The University of Oklahoma; among others. Nguyen 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 2021, NYSCA, 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.” She received her BA from Brown University and is a Visual Arts MFA candidate at Columbia University.

See Alison Nguyen's website here.

List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.

Sponsors

Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Sara-Ann & Robert Sanders. Additional funding for List Projects 26: Alison Nguyen is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.  

Images

: Through windows on the Brutalist façade of Renzo Piano-designed [building], visitors move through orange-hued galleries. Still from history as hypnosis
Three young women dressed in all white eat large bags of yellow chips and drink soda from brandless Styrofoam cups outdoors. Filmed from the driver’s seat of a car, a vent window and rear-view mirror frame the scene.
Three screens with the outer two positioned at an angle to the one at center together mimic the field of vision from a car. The screens show three women situated in a car moving through a car wash.
A 180° view of the gallery, to the left a large rectangular screen shows the exterior of a concrete building with a warm glow on the inside. The space is divided by a long aluminum bench and orange-red fabric wallwall text to the right.
Installation view of a glowing orange gallery with three partially-obstructed suspended screens showing people laughing at a party and singing karaoke.
A person is seated in front of the three screens where a white limo is stretched across all three projections.
white walls with introductory text are visible at left. At center is an orange screen print with yellow text and a video sculpture resembling a side view mirror and a right wall made of orange-red moiré fabric.
A white wall in the left foreground displays a reddish orange screen print featuring a rectangular block of yellow text framed in white. To the right is a video sculpture displaying an extreme close-up of a woman’s face. The walls in the background glow orange
Two adjacent screens show three women dressed in white sitting in the backseat of a car while the other two screens are only visible from the back.
A burnt orange screen print is hung on the left wall. A screen held by a mount that looks like a car’s sideview mirror showing woman with black hair gazing at the viewer is hung off the wall to the right, lit with orange gallery lighting. To the far right, a projector shows the rear half of a white limousine against a desert landscape.
Three suspended screens show a white stretch limousine in a desert landscape. The image of the limo is stretched across all three screens, in the portion at center, a suited figure appears to emerge from an open car door.
A dark poster that reads “LIST PROJECTS 26: ALISON NGUYEN” with image of orange glowing windows is hung next to two glass gallery doors with the same text and similar glowing light.  

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