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New York-based artist Alison Nguyen presents her solo exhibition ’The Kisses & Guns Show’ at an alternative art space: The West Side Rifle & Pistol Range in Gramercy. Nguyen works in an array of media including analogue/digital photography, silkscreen, and writing, often integrating unconventional artistic tools in her process; among them: lips and rifles.
The artist takes her signature ’kisses & guns’ to heart, displaying a rapid sequence of her iconic kiss stains and bullet holes on shooting targets in the narrow hallway entrance to the gun range. The merchandise display cases in the Range’s shooting gallery feature an art installation consisting of bullet shells, film canisters, lipstick tubes, Nguyen\'s bookworks, guns, and antique cameras.
For the opening and closing events, the artist will hang images from her new photo series ’Crimes of Passion & Other Abstractions’ from target clips in the actual firing range. ’Crimes of Passion’ reflects contradictions in the photographic medium; the images exist in an ever-shifting space between narration, documentation, and abstraction. With humor, Nguyen rejects the notion that the photographic image is an analogue to reality or that it ’prints’ a memory.
The series centers on ideas of trace as undefined presence/absence. Kiss-stained subjects occupy the worlds Nguyen creates. She treats the body as a sculptural element framing it in powerful, off-balance arrangements of color, light, and shadow. The perception of the viewer gives meaning to the lip-marks which can appear as painterly strokes, as sultry stains of ephemeral affairs, as documentation of bruises or lacerations, as residue, as evidence of sensual delight.
To be expected: heavily locked up artillery; (snap)shots, lipstick, slapstick; bullets as beads, kisses as medium; eros, thanatos, nachos; drinks, kiss stains, bodily abstraction; portraits, fatal attraction, a \'mixed crowd\', the NYPD, Bob Teenager, youth & revelry, septuagenarians; noir references, a fair amount of filth, but--if you will--dress to slaughter; outside the box though rarely off mark...
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