MICHELLE NGUYEN | HORROR VACUI
Michelle Nguyen | Horror Vacui
November 5-16, 2022
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday November 5, 2-4pm - Artist in attendance
Michelle Nguyen uses oil, pastel, and vivid colours to illustrate worlds dense with mythology, symbolism, and narrative. In her current work, Nguyen looks to encourage viewers to think and speak openly about human mortality and acknowledge death as an inevitable reality - she believes that contemporary Western society has created a culture of death denial and fear that is detrimental to the emotional and spiritual well being of the individual and the communities to which they belong. She infuses her images with important commentary on inherited trauma and ancestral grief through her lens as part of a Vietnamese Canadian family.
In her new show, Nguyen explores themes of mortality through the Victorian aesthetic horror vacui (Latin for ‘fear of empty space’) as a way to talk about the unknowns of the future and the afterlife.