WIND

Verb: sculpture as a Wind

In letting materials speak, as opposed to being mere representations of their context, their history, rhythm and feel come together to create form that plays in space to become sculpture. Guided by materials, the work can come into its own “through an unpredictability, an undoing”. Rather than torturing metal until it snaps, or dulling plastics that would rather shine—a bending of objects to the artist’s will that privileges meaning over process and the sensibilities of making—Trịnh throws herself into the mess of winding and long-winded relations between materials to find her own logic in the illogical. Motorbike skeletons are bound with ribbon-skins. Hat racks that hold shoes, rain ponchos and even tires now wear blooms of plastic beads like fireworks that fall like earrings. Trịnh’s materials, beyond their designated use dictated by the manufacturers, speed past their context to find other adventures.

Intimacy between viewer and sculpture (or object or thing or art), then, does not depend on the viewer’s closeness to its context, but their closeness to its point of view. To experience sculpture is “to shift from looking at a small unit to looking from its place in the world”. Instead of focussing on meta-narratives and overarching systems as a way to understand the scale of the world, through microlevel analyses, one can gauge how the agentive capacities of ordinary people and things—that is, the small units—affect and shift the structures on the opposite end of the scale. It is an easy impulse to consider, for example, Trịnh’s use of bling as decorative or kitsch, and from there place the work, read the work within that discourse. But bling’s point of view is a vibe. Bling is B.G. rapping about cash money; bling is the sound that light makes; bling is ostentatious; bling doesn’t care about elitist notions of taste. You don’t need to be part of the bling canon to see that bling shouts how good you feel today, bling attracts punters to your shop, bling says “hey, baby, you know I love you”. Bling could just be fluff, and cheap, and pointless, but that is precisely why bling’s point of view matters in the world.

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Making sculpture, for Vy Trịnh, is a way of “living, looking, and moving through the world dimensionally, foregrounding the textures of the ordinary”. Of her approach to making, Trịnh cites the anthropologist Veena Das: “I do not take the ordinary to be a mere background to basic rhythms of life repeated through force of habit; instead, I take habit itself to be a condition of creativity ingrained in the tissues of everyday actions”. Turning to the ordinary does not mean to aestheticise or romanticise it, but to really live that ordinary and be transformed by ordinariness. What a world we live in that, in ON DA DREAM as in on the streets, you can turn a corner and see sculpture with you, everywhere you go.

Verb: sculpture is a verb. - Thái Hà
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VISION, 2024
Honda Vision moped chassis, flat steel bar, steel rod, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, plastic beads, nickel-plated steel ball chain, rhinestone chain, wheel, rebar, hex nut, stators, copper wire, brass, flux and rhinestone mesh
166 x 230 x 175 cm

FUTURE, 2024
Honda Future moped chassis, Senko fanguards, found aluminum frame, flat steel bar, steel rod, custom-made steel frame, rebar, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, nickel-plated steel ball chain, plastic beads and rhinestone chain
150 x 205 x 160 cm

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Speedy Curve – Ring 2**, 2024
stainless steel clothing rack, custom-made steel frame, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, metallic ribbon, plastic beads, nickel-plated steel ball chain, rhinestone chain, rhinestone mesh, plastic pearls and adhesive
186 x 190 x 130 cm

Speedy Curve – Double, 2024
stainless steel clothing rack, custom-made steel frame, steel rod, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, metallic ribbon, plastic beads, nickel-plated steel ball chain, rhinestone chain, rhinestone mesh and adhesive
188 x 154 x 140 cm

Speedy Curve – Spider 1, 2024
stainless steel clothing rack, custom-made steel frame, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, metallic ribbon, plastic beads, rhinestone chain, rhinestone mesh, nickel-plated steel ball chain, plastic pearls and adhesive
175 x 140 x 125 cm

Speedy Curve – Spider 2, 2024
stainless steel clothing rack, custom-made steel frame, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, metallic ribbon, plastic beads, rhinestone chain, rhinestone mesh, nickel-plated steel ball chain and adhesive
170 x 117 x 84 cm

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More about the exhibition: https://www.galeriequynh.com/exhibitions/137-on-da-dream-vy-trinh/

On Da Dream @ Galerie Quynh
August 10 - October 12, 2024

On Da Dream,2024

Blind Maps Series