![]() With history as hypnosis, Nguyen foregrounds the critical openings and solidarities that can be fashioned between multiples, look-alikes, and echoes in diaspora. Nguyen advocates the creative freedoms an artist can locate by making editions in a patriarchal and novelty-driven market-a theme she has explored in works featuring the digitally animated Andra8, a “freemium” avatar and stand-in for Nguyen as artist. In November, Nguyen led a workshop at Wendy’s Subway, where she spoke on her affinity for iterations and disseminating work across various contexts. Duplicated sections from the poem burst across the screen at junctures in the film’s storyline, as if functions of programming gone awry. The poem’s narrator grapples with the memory of being herded to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum-a warehouse of American weapons, including those used to commit atrocious violence in Vietnam-by a seemingly deranged, immigrant uncle, who finds tremendous glee in purchasing a used limousine as his everyday car. The live-action sequences are severed throughout by bright slides of text, spouting glitchy animations of a riotous poem by the artist’s brother, Matthew Nguyen. The monied armors of both building and car present a sardonic cinema of the increasingly apocalyptic, poverty-ridden streets of America’s large cities. Spitting morphed images of their environs back outward via their cool-glass shells, it is as if the campus’s Forum Building and Business School exist in class-antagonism with the “outer world”-not unlike the way city reflections stream across the dark windows of creeping limousines. But it is Columbia University’s new Harlem campus that Nguyen adapts as the film’s AI company headquarters. The film incorporates an encounter with a policeman outside Google’s real-life office in Venice, California, dubbed the “Binoculars Building” for the giant, matte-black sculpture out front. Stilted, handheld footage out the limousine’s windows juxtaposes the novelty gimmicks of entrepreneurs-a KFC store in the shape of its signature chicken bucket-with the similarly promotional, though deceptively less self-referential, structures of big tech. In these spectrally choreographed moments, human dynamics seem to lilt along a slanted plane, where laughter meets historical tragedies.Īrchitecture looms in the film, shot between Southern California and New York City. Next, all of them are seated together at a restaurant, the women chortling at his joke. A hairdresser spots them outside his window and aims a red blow-dryer at them, as if to shoot. As the women stop at various stores, they are met with instinctive aggression from other workers. The limo’s route remains staunch despite its illogicality, while the energy between the protagonists crackles. There is a comic aspect to watching the enormous limousine, itself an outdated status symbol, bumbling over rocky paths, or pulling into a strip-mall parking lot. Tonight’s premiere of the single-screen cinema version adds another facet to the work, and to its beveled confrontation of desires reflected in American movie genres: the noir, the road journey, and the sci-fi tale of aliens. Earlier this year, it manifested as two separate three-channel installations: one at Nguyen’s solo show at MIT List Center, the other as part of Columbia University’s Visual Arts MFA Thesis exhibition. Glassy surfaces, warped mirrors, and facsimile images abound in Alison Nguyen’s film history as hypnosis (2023), which has itself appeared previously in different valences. Sunlight refracts through the long tinted windows, blending with the blue LED strips within. The presence of a driver remains nebulous throughout, as does that of an offscreen guide who continually addresses the women in tech-leader jargon, extolling the benefits of networks and compasses. They could be sisters, or perhaps coworkers. Three women in stark white outfits sit in the back, their arms touching. A vehicle with a trajectory, as in any road movie: a white limousine angling its way through the desert into Hollywood.
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