Van Tran Nguyen @ cHURCH OF MONIKA
March 14th, 2021
Sunday, 11am
on ZOOM, Meeting ID: 829 3385 9008
Van Tran Nguyen will introduce her newest project: a film called Erie County Smile (2021). Erie County Smile is a parody of “Paris By Night” (PBN), a popular Vietnamese-language variety show. PBN gained notoriety in the Vietnamese diasporic community by the mid-1990s and is still in production today. Music from the live shows were recorded and commonly played at Vietnamese-owned businesses all over the world. In the waiting area of my family’s nail salon, we always had PBN in the VHS player.
This film is dedicated to children of immigrants, who grew up behind doors labeled “EMPLOYEES ONLY”. Erie County Smile is a satirical short film by Van Tran Nguyen, in collaboration with Alex Derwick, Ako Shergazy, Bryan Czerniawski and Mengtai Zhang.
Bio:
Van Tran Nguyen is a multi-media artist. She was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 1992 and immigrated to America in 1997. Tran Nguyen holds a BA in Fine Arts and Biology and an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Philosophy of Electronic Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions including Ill at Ease: Dis-ease in Art (2017, University at Buffalo), Shape of a Pocket (2017, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center), Strange Agency (2017, Buffalo Arts Studio) and, Paris, Orange County (2020, Lycoming College). In 2016, Tran Nguyen and collaborator Natalie Fleming co-curated The Measure of All Things: Rethinking Humanism through Art at the University at Buffalo Department of Art Gallery. In 2017, Tran Nguyen and Fleming premiered their group exhibition Forging American: Art in the Workings of an Asian American Rust Belt at Big Orbit Project Space (CEPA Gallery) in Buffalo, New York. Their third curatorial project, Art Stands Still, exhibited in Troy, NY at Collar Works Gallery in May 2019. She currently lives in upstate New York with her cat, Gordon.
