Memory & Marketplace
This series is inspired by my incredibly moving homeland trip to Vietnam in 2001, the first trip I took back to Vietnam as an adult.
The narrative elements in this series are driven by figure, gesture and locale. Gestures and small details tell stories about every day life in the marketplaces, rural villages, and coastal towns of southern Vietnam. I was interested in the ordinary, in the gesture of a cyclo driver taking a smoke break in the middle of the day amidst the hustle and bustle, humidity, noise, dust, and crowdedness of Ho Chi Minh City, in a cyclist amidst a crowd of commuters, wiping sweat from her brow, in girls walking through town together, holding hands.
I worked mainly from pictures and sketches I took during my trip as well as stories and insights I kept in a journal. I was especially interested in the easily-overlooked details from pictures, in the subjects hiding in the backgrounds or shadows or lost in a visual jumble. These pieces were in part an exercise in bringing some clarity and attention to subjects who would otherwise be lost.
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- Xyclo Driver, 18″ x 24″, Private Collection
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- Binh Tuy Girls, 18″ x 24″, Private collection
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- Old Woman On Her Way, 6″ x 6″, Private Collection
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- Yellow, 6″ x “6, Private Collection
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- Marketplace, a Self Portrait, 16″ x 20″, Private Collection
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- Where My Mother Was a Girl, 22″ x 34″
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- Workers at Sunset, 5″ x 15″, Private Collection
