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.

BURST

Verb: sculpture as a Burst

Five! Four! Three! Two! One!

Boom!!! And crackle…

Metal rods erupt from a motorbike disc brake. The force of explosion sends off ribbons of light. What flies up drips down in chains and clusters. In the blur, the moment goes uncaptured.

Yet the moment is there, present, presently. The metal rods keep erupting, ribbons flying, chains dripping. Where the metal rod is bent, it is not bent: bend in the past, but bending, still, to the movements of the hands, hands that move, still, with ease and resistance. Trịnh’s methods of making do not result in “finished work”—a product that is the culmination of actions with beginnings and ends employed to manipulate materials—but actually are the work. Her making processes reject the hierarchy of skill, where painting is considered a high-level craft reserved for the artist, braiding rattan a simple sequence of repetitions carried out by quote-unquote craftswomen, and welding a demanding and precise task that is nevertheless denigrated as mere manual labour, as if manual labour, as with all forms of making, is anything short of alchemical. If methods of making are the work, and methods of making are methods of transition (of things changing states to become other things), then the work is always in transition—a work in the present tense. More than representations of signs and symbols, Trịnh’s sculptures are actants that affect and are affected by non-/super-human entities, and the “fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character” of the relations between those entities.

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

SPILL

Verb: sculpture as a Spill

Spill: a verb of excess, accidents and unpredictability. A verb on the brink

—of a flow drip

concealing as it reveals / interiority:

guts and tears spill off as strikes

slicing space as strokes on paper

metal bars crease, fold and spring

in inverse gravity, reach-/recoil-ing cursives use ends as beginnings to curl and curl

and curl, soft, wet words spraying threads of spittle

that glint and fade as shadow-bodies shadow objects

to glint again between ribbon-bandages or ribbon-bows that curl like metal.

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The thing about spills is that they have shape based on the thing that they’re in when they’re unrealised spills, but also countless shapes that could always come into being based on how the spill came into being. Twist your back to stretch and your elbow flings along with momentum. On contact, force transfers as vibrations, rippling through the walls of a cup, say, and makes waves of its contents until the waves start to slosh, and everything, like the whole thing, is buzzing with nervous anticipation. It gathers mass, hurling out of the cup, and the air does a clumsy catch and capture before splat or rather swirls. As it spreads it thins yet becomes bigger. You study its morphing shape to guess whether the gesture that was applied to the spill was soft or violent or medium before panic and it meets the mop.

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