Tammy Nguyen
Through Aug. 8. Smack Mellon, 92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn; (718) 834-8761, smackmellon.org.
With a recent tropical storm causing floods in the East Coast and a drought and heat wave in the West, it’s as timely as ever to be thinking about climate change. Three solo shows at Smack Mellon consider the topic, my favorite of which, by Tammy Nguyen, uses painting and printmaking to emphasize how entangled it is with capitalism and geopolitics.
Nguyen’s exhibition is titled “Freehold” in reference to Forest City, a real estate development being built on four man-made islands in Malaysia. Forest City markets itself as a technologically advanced, environmentally friendly tax-free capitalist utopia. When the artist visited in 2019, a salesperson told her, “No climate change here.”