Exhibitions
Galerie Quynh
Aug 10 - Oct 10, 2024
All images courtesy Galerie Quynh.
Galerie Quynh is thrilled to present ON DA DREAM, a solo exhibition by Vy Trịnh, curated by Thái Hà. Showcasing a series of new sculptures spread across three floors as well as a site-responsive sculptural installation, the artist’s first show with the gallery blurs the distinction between its exhibition rooms and the streets and pavements just beyond the gallery’s courtyard. In the works of Vy Trịnh, the streets are not just places to pass through but a living environment that borrows and morphs materials, creating methodologies and sculptures through the bundling and stacking of commodities that spill out of shop fronts to flood pavements. Reappropriating highly manufactured objects and media as raw materials, Trịnh grinds, bends, wraps, ties, burnishes, and adds bling. Metal, ribbons, and bead chains are grounded—balancing directly on the gallery floor—and yet buzz with potential movement.
On the streets, stillness is an impossibility; pausing is not an option; you may never fully grasp your surroundings in their entirety. Positive and negative space are defined by whatever available space one could fit into. Moving goods, objects, and motors melt into the large and elusive material-semiotic environment.
An ode to the city dwellers, manual workers, and mass-produced automotive objects that inhabit the streets together in a blur of movement, ON DA DREAM reconfigures the gallery as an extension of the chaotic world outside. Trịnh's sculptures impart visual and textural cues to trace the life cycles of commercial goods, material ecologies and local economies. A blending of interior and exterior, her works are always “becoming”, following the traffic of objects, different forms of gendered labour and agency, and the sites where these categories are constantly being negotiated and improvised.
In ON DA DREAM, dreams are always grounded, always in motion, and always at full speed.
Vy Trịnh (b. 1996, Ho Chi Minh City) is a sculptor whose work explores how networks of objects extend beyond themselves and reflect the larger socio-economic textures and conditions of contemporary Vietnam. Materials and objects are sourced from different economies and ecologies—infrastructural, automotive, electric, discarded. Methodologies and material content are intertwined, insisting on resourcefulness and a makeshift ethos indebted to the city’s polyrhythmic, cyclical, and sedimented material environment.
Vy holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design. In 2023, she presented her first solo project, Overvoltage, at Gia Lam Train Station in Hanoi, Vietnam. Vy has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including at Sàn Art (Ho Chi Minh City), Shisanwu LLC (Queens, NY), Worthless Studios (Brooklyn, NY), Atelier (Philadelphia, PA), Automat (Philadelphia, PA), White Columns (New York, NY), and Gallery MC (New York, NY). She was the recipient of the 2022 Christopher Lyon Memorial Award. That same year, she received grants from the Humanities Urbanism Design Initiative (H+U+D), The Sachs Program for Art Innovation, and the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Vy currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City and New York.
