SNAKE

Verb: sculpture as a Snake

Creeping, coiling, crawling, droop. Whip-wires (or spinal cords) pierce through or are conjured and thrown to the ceiling where they stretch and contract space, until the stretching and contracting render vivid elasticity. Shooting out from armatures, Vy Trịnh’s sculptures reach for the edge of their dimensional confines until their pressing at the limits turns rigid planes to clingfilm. It is on these pliant planes, rather than hard tarmac, that the driver weaves her motorbike through the streets, orientating and disorientating herself among the signs and wares that blur and bounce across the field of refracting vision. To see, better not to focus.

In the works of Vy Trịnh, the streets are not just pass-throughs but a site that borrows and creates materials, making methodologies, and sculpture itself through the bundling and stacking of commodities that spill out of shop fronts to flood pavements. If the Dadaists revelled at an upturned bicycle wheel stuck to a stool because *novelty*, the Vietnamese shopkeeper has long arranged her wares in absurd combinations and appropriated objects for use and misuse out of creative necessity. With the same urgency and do-I-give-a-damn?-ism, Trịnh uses highly manufactured materials and objects not as “readymades”, but bootlegs them as raw materials: she grinds, bends, wraps, ties, burnishes, and adds bling.

Electrical wires, in Chandelier, are ripped out from behind the walls. Bound in gradations of metallic ribbon and dressed with bead chains at the tip, these tentacular current-conduits no longer facilitate light but imply light itself. Branching out from one another rather than a core source, the cables of Chandelier snake and curl, endlessly passing on power from the mechanic’s drill to the smoothie shop’s blender to the welder’s fan. The ability to make a meagre source of electricity go on and on, infinitely, through looping extensions, flies in the face of the scarcity principle. On the streets, strategies of making-it-work make magic making energy.

On the streets, too, the driver blinkers right and turns left. Every minute that she is moving she is living out a dream—the wonderful dream of mobility. To dream here is to aspire to, to want. And in realising the social and economic mobility that a newly opened market allows, you first have to turn the dream literal and own the automotive object that lets you move. It is, of course, no coincidence that the Honda Dream model appeared on the Vietnamese markets in 1992, a few years after the Đổi Mới reforms that began the country’s transition towards a market economy. Dreaming inextricably links the dreamer to the mazes of commodity and supply chains, relations of production, purchasable labour, consumption trends, but also the affective experiences of adapting to the techno-economic conditions that regard progress and efficiency as ends in in themselves, rather than means to create desirable social ends. Traffic flows around the ba gác backing up to a renovating shop front to collect construction debris. The driver rolls on, wishing driving could be faster. - Thái Hà.

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Chandelier, 2024
motor electrical wire, rubber cable end cap, multiple connector block, hex nuts, adhesive, metallic ribbon, rhinestone chain and cable zip ties
420 cm, Ø 120 cm

DREAM, 2024
Rusted ring and a crushed section from a pipe, and nickel-plated steel ball chain.
157 x 230 x 208 cm

Fast 'n Secure (1-6), 2024
motorbike center hanger rack, nickel-plated steel ball mesh, metallic ribbon, satin ribbon, rhinestone chain, rhinestone mesh, plastic beads and adhesive
76 x 21 x 38 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