September 16, 2011 - December 16, 2011
Los Angeles-based artist Trang T. Lê's artwork is featured in the HOY SPACE, a new project gallery at the Vincent Price Art Museum in which emerging artists appear in their first solo museum show and mid-career artists can exhibit new work that may not fit in other contexts or venues. In Spanish, Hoy means "today" or "nowadays," and fittingly, the HOY SPACE features artists who address current and active contemporary topics in their work and whose practice may extend across media.
Lê's large-scale painting 111,978 is an elegy to our contemporary times. It was made over a period of four years, from 2006 to 2010. In this painting, the artist confronted events of epic proportions but did so in a manner that allows us to first experience the sensation of pleasure before that of pain. Seven large canvases hung end-to-end envelope the viewer upon entry; we approach what resembles a large body of water or even a gigantic aquarium. Thousands of multi-hued blue spheres in dense microbial constellations on the left panels seem to give way to streaming, more open and loose pearl-like strands floating against a dark inky background. Lê has created a monumental abstract landscape that in its delicacy, fluidity, and pure spatial experience is joyous.
Instinctively we recognize that a great deal of time and concentration are invested in this piece. If the enigmatic title, 111,978, is suggestive of the complexity of the work, any quantity over one hundred thousand is substantial to be sure. This large-scale painting is an amalgamation of the artist's subjective experience with life and death processed through events of our contemporary times. Indeed after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, Lê was jolted into memories of her own personal experience with warfare in Viet Nam where she was born in 1970 and lived until she was twelve. The horrific scenes she witnessed there and lived through were unfathomable to her as a child: gunfire, screams, scenes of destruction were unintelligible occurrences in the existence she had known. The post-9/11 culture of combat in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, was eerily familiar.
After the United States declared war on Iraq in 2003, Lê began meticulously recording the names and faces – when available –of combatant deaths on the pages of several notebooks; in 2006, she transferred her practice of documentation to abstract painting. All along, she consulted online sources such as CNN for combatant deaths and Iraq Bodycount for civilian deaths (www.iraqbodycount.org) and made records of every fatality in Iraq that had been documented: she included the American soldiers, the coalition forces, and the civilians. All deaths counted.
Keeping notebooks was impractical for the artist; it was also causing her depression. Lê had painted small abstract spirals in other bodies of work. This practice relaxed her. It was meditative. In 2006, she started to record fatalities in Iraq by painting spiral circles—each circle represented a human life lost. At the time when she began the project, she expected she would only need one canvas to record these deaths. For Lê, the project was completed when President Obama announced the end of the American combat mission in Iraq on August 31, 2010.
Born in Nha Trang, Viet Nam in 1970, Trang T. Lê lives and works in Huntington Beach, CA. She received her BS in Anthropology in 1996 and a BA in Studio Art in 2003, both from the University of California, Riverside. In 2006, she completed her MFA at the Claremont Graduate University. This is her first solo museum exhibition. She has had solo shows at Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont University, and Division 9 Art Gallery, in addition to multiple group exhibitions across the United States. Her newest work will be featured this November in a solo show at Ruth Bachofner Gallery in Santa Monica. Lê is also a instructor at Stanford Academy in Aliso Viejo, CA. Please visit the artist's website: https://www.trangtle.com/ for more information.
Installation Shots
Opening Reception
