Hesse Flatow X Five Myles: THAD HIGA | TAMMY NGUYEN and ESSENTIAL SERVICES: 2020 WOODCUTS ZORAWAR SIDHU, Rob Swainston

March 15 - April 11, 2021

In collaboration with two exhibitions at FiveMyles in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

O,
THAD HIGA, TAMMY NGUYEN. curated by Marine Cornuet

O, is an address, an utterance emerging from the body, passing the threshold of the throat and mouth then thrust out into the open. It's a circle, the return of what has been presented as finished, done or stuck in the past, back into the present and the material world - it records the previously unrecorded or inserts it back into the archive. The work in this exhibition participates in the update of the collective archive - a living organism made of intimate stories and macro-narratives that power dynamics usually shape. It examines the past, official and unofficial histories, myths, and personal stories which accumulate and seep into the present through the physicality of the exhibited work.
Tammy Nguyen exhibits four artist books that interact with the howling, echoing sound of the letter “O” and further the exploration of themes that Nguyen already engages with in her latest book, Phong Nha, the Making of an American Smile (Ugly Duckling Press, 2020). Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a manmade island called Forest City in the Strait of Malacca, as well as cave formations in Phong Nha (Vietnam), and the Vietnam War are part of the narrative.

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The artist books, entitled “Four Ways Through a Cave” are also based on two pieces of music: the old South Vietnamese national anthem, for which the father of Nguyen’s dentist was a lyricist, and a country song reminiscent of a tune sung by the porter that Nguyen followed into a cave formation in Phong Nha. The artist positions these two songs as opposing forces; the books feature drawings from the score of both songs and incorporates sculptural elements, contrasting textures, cutouts from American Vietnam War comics, and hidden illuminated sections that only appear when a page is turned.
Nguyen’s series of paintings on paper, stretched over wood panels, allude to Plato’s Divided Line and the threshold between the visible and the intelligible, and reflect on the sound of the letter “O” in the aftermath of war and trauma. Nguyen uses the circle and fragments of circles in the composition, often through the representation of natural environments including swarms of bats and butterflies. A circular painting, entirely made of metal leaf, refers both to close-up images of the sun taken by ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter in the Spring of 2020 and to the representation of Truth in the Allegory of the Cave.

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Thad Higa’s This Land is My Land is a large format book that unfolds in ever surprising ways. It subverts language taken from white supremacist speech, highlighting the insecurity built up from centuries of lies. Collages superimpose images of grass, shopping malls, graveyards and parking lots. Symbols are created then disassembled, revealing the dangerous malleability of racist speech and imagery.

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PORTABLE LIBRARY # 10, 2021
mixed media (cardboard, polyvinyl, paper)
3 3/4 x 6 x 6 1/2" (closed)
Includes x5 tiny zines: Highway of Prayers (2019) Poetry for Politicians (2017) Looking Too Hard (2018) Stanza in the Forest (2017) Babblism Iss 2 (2017)
Higa’s tiny zines are a series of books no larger than 2.5 by 1.5 inches. They question the effects of scale: does the scaled down version of an object create a feeling of intimacy for the reader, or do the zines become absurd objects because of their size? Does this physical smallness diminish the greater ideas explored in the texts, such as identity, racism, the American Dream? A portable library containing some of these “tiny zines” is exhibited at FiveMyles through April 11th and the public is welcome to open and unfold the books, absorb their content, and fold them back to return them to their place in the library.

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- Thad Higa
  Culture X , 2019
  Mixed media (aluminum, polyvinyl, paper, Ibuprofen)
  3.5 x 3.5 x 1" closed
- Thad Higa
  Inhale/Point/Flex/Exhale , 2019
  Mixed media (paper, cardstock, Tengu tape)
  2.75 x 2 x 2" closed
Also at FiveMyles:
ESSENTIAL SERVICES: 2020 WOODCUTS

Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston are a collaborative art duo exploring the intersection of historical print processes and digital fabrication technology. Their projects investigate the complexities of contemporary social issues, drawing from the history of print as the medium par excellence of social movements.
As largely peaceful protestors filled the streets of cities around the world in response to the racist murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among others, many of Manhattan’s retail storefronts and institutions boarded up their windows with plywood. Much of this plywood became the surface for graffiti expressing solidarity with the protest movements. As institutions began to take these physical barriers down, Sidhu and Swainston rescued this conceptually charged material for multi-color woodcut prints. The images are carvings of the protests which incorporate the graffiti remnants left on the plywood. Woodcut is a medium of the people—a medium that gives expression to anti-authoritarian movements and facilitates the mass distribution of ideas. They return this plywood to the public to subvert the original intention of the wood to hide from the public and as artistic and political expression in solidarity with the protests.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Thad Higa (b. 1989) is a Honolulu based book artist, writer, concrete poet, and graphic designer interested in the synergy of written and visual language, and cardboard boxes. His work investigates identity shaping through the currents of mass information, disinformation, and advertisements. His work also addresses the life of words devoid human beings, the machinations of words behind and besides words, and is attempting to turn the act of opening and reading books and boxes into the next modern dance: a hand/finger dance. www.thadhiga.com

Born in San Francisco, Tammy Nguyen received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2007. The year following, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked with a ceramics company for three years thereafter. Nguyen received an MFA from Yale in 2013 and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014. She has exhibited at the Rubin Museum, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam, and the Bronx Museum, among others. Her work is included in the collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library. Nguyen is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects.
Nguyen is represented by Hesse Flatow, for inquires contact info@hesseflatow.com . www.tammynguyenstudio.com

Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston are a collaborative art duo exploring the intersection of historical print processes and digital fabrication technology. Their projects investigate the complexities of contemporary social issues, drawing from the history of print as the medium par excellence of social movements.
Visit each artist’s website: zorawarsidhu.com and robswainston.com

FiveMyles was founded and incorporated as a non-profit in 1999. Their mission is to advance public interest in innovative experimental work; to identify and exhibit the work of underrepresented artists, and to engage the local community through participation in the arts. FiveMyles focuses on giving emerging, merited, and well-established artists the opportunity to present their work in solo and group exhibitions. Place, personal vision, politics, identity and experimentation are an integral part of programming at FiveMyles. Exhibitions are often inspired by art rooted in non-Western cultures and have included photography and video from East Africa and contemporary Native and Caribbean art.

Visit http://fivemyles.org/ for gallery hours and directions.