F&DM's visiting artist series continues in 2010-11 with our first guest, Nina Yuen.
Selections of Nina Yuen's work will be shown, including White Blindness, Alison, David, and Joan.
The Visiting Artist Series is sponsored by Porter College.
Amsterdam-based, American emerging artist Nina Yuen approaches video as a tactile medium. Her seductively honest and visually striking narratives weave elements of her personal relationships with found stories and appropriated personae. Yuenʼs films are unabashedly romantic and quietly profound assemblages of performance, spoken monologue, soundtrack and montage, which create a flux of vivid imagery and feeling. Yuenʼs work as a filmmaker engages with the production of false personal memories and with stirring disagreements about the past in the accounts of family and friends.
Recent exhibitions include: An Imaginary Relationship with Ourselves, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Oregon; Performance, Manifestacao Internacional, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; De-narrations, PanAmerican Art Projects, Miami, Florida; The Sky Within My House, Contemporary Art Patios, Cordoba, Spain. Yuen recently opened her first major solo exhibition at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York City.
Yuen completed her BA at Harvard University and a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Details on her film selections:
White Blindness
White Blindness, a condition that causes one to see nothing but a white glare, is a film for which Yuen transformed her studio/living space into a completely white space as a way to experience the phenomenon. Blurring the line between her work and her life, for one year, anything she bought she spray-painted white. Preoccupied with naming and ordering, Yuen's voice-over includes a history of the term "post-traumatic stress disorder", instructions for an Islamic bathing ritual and an essay by Joan Acocella.
Alison
In Alison, the loose narrative is inspired by a story of the artist's childhood friend who wandered off one winter without a coat and was found dead months later. The piece incorporates the artist's voice-over of an excerpt from the missing persons report filed by his mother (Alison), a snippet of Virginia Woolf's suicide note, and a poem by Raymond Carver.
David
David is an adaptation of a text by Carmen Delzell in which a woman enters into a pact with the devil and becomes eternally indebted to him. In the video Yuen performs a number of magic rituals. The following fragment comes from Delzell's story: "It was beginning to get chilly. Money would really be tight when it got too cold to sell on the street, so I decided to go to a fortune teller. She lived and worked in a storefront in Chinatown. She was fat and sneaky-looking and had only one breast. But it turned out she was right about everything to come and she gave me three wishes. I wished for an apartment, a man, and an antique store...”
Joan
In Joan, the artist draws a connection between the biography of Joan of Arc – the French heroine who was burned at the stake on the accusation of heresy at the alleged age of 19 – and the voluntary death of moths flying into light bulbs, quoting the poem 'The Lesson of the Moth' by Don Marquis. Illustrated with images of burning moths, a cut-out woman and the artist enacting Joan of Arc, this film is a reflection on the fragility of life: “it is better to be happy / for a moment / and be burned up with beauty / than to live a long time / and be bored all the while”...
Please note the new time for our artist series.