On March 30th I attended Quynh Tran's artist lecture before walking through her MFA Thesis Exhibition. Quynh Tran is a graduate student of the University of Reno, Nevada and is originally from Hanoi, Vietnam. She received her BFA in printmaking and an MA in advertising from the University of North Texas. Her lecture goes into further detail about how she came to put together her MFA Thesis Exhibition. She talks about the three fold sequences of rites of passage that are the definition of liminality: separation, transition, and aggregation. She then talks about her personal liminal stages. The first being that something has to come to an end; her family left Vietnam and she as now become separated from her homeland. The second stage includes how she has now come to be a part of two separate cultures and her everyday notions of identity, time, and space have become suspended. In the final liminal stage she has been able to confirm her new social status and accepts her "duel-identity."
For her current gradate work that is being shown in the Jot Travis Building: Student Galleries South on the University of Nevada, Reno campus. This liminal space that Tran has felt for a portion of her life is represented by the three room installation in the Student Galleries. Using red and white as her primary colors, walking through these rooms almost feels as if something terrible has happened, for as Tran mentions in her lecture, red is the color of danger.
The first two rooms contain different materials, but are the same colors and are meant to look as if they are floating, such as she has been floating through life not knowing her identity. Scrolls of paper hang from the ceiling in one room, and red string hangs across the room from wall to wall in another. I wouldn't necessarily say that they give the feeling of floating by and through, but they do have a possible sense of chaos and can make one feel uncertain of what to expect from room to room, as she would have felt while to trying to find her true identity. In the third room, she has projected a short summary of what her exhibition is meant to represent and how she has felt being in between two psychological states and have put them into a visual form.
I am glad that I had attended the artist lecture before viewing this exhibition because the use of the color red and bright LED lights can be quite a shock to walk into when entering this gallery. However, after having heard the lecture and being given a small bit of detail behind the work, it made it even more of an interesting gallery exhibition to walk through before getting to the most back room and seeing her explanation again of what the work is meant to represent. For one who would not have attended the lecture first would see two different gallery spaces as they go in first not knowing what everything around them is meant to be a representation of, and then once they have read the projection in the back, they can walk back through everything and have a completely different sense of what they are looking at because they now have an idea of what was going on inside the artist's head when she put together her MFA Thesis Exhibition.
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