05/29/24

Winnie Truong
Curious Nature

Winnie Truong Calgary Contemporary 2024
Mona Filip

The imagery of Winnie Truong’s paper dioramas, sculptures, murals and stop-motion animations seems otherworldly at first approach. With penknife, scissors and colour pencils, she draws an enthralling realm where flora and feminine creatures entwine symbiotically. Her layered tableaux evoke pop-up fairy-tale books, shadow puppets, theatrical sets, as well as the Chinese folk tradition of paper cutting – all forms of storytelling relying on paper’s capacity to shape, unfold and bring to life new dimensions of existence. Truong’s predilection for drawing recalls the pleasure of childhood time spent immersed in imaginary worlds born of pencils and crayons. Drawing is also the medium of study, of scientific illustration and annotation – a role it equally fulfills in Truong’s meticulous work as the instrument of a careful observer devoted to understanding and documenting a different form of life.

Hybrid, morphing figures populate this universe, constantly switching roles: human bodies become landscape, plants take centre stage. All creatures mix and form composite entities, with no apparent fixed or impenetrable boundaries to their being. Any hint of hierarchy, scale and distinction collapses into a fluid merging between characters and scenery. As Truong continues the development of her fictional world with the series presented in Curious Nature at Contemporary Calgary, structuring narratives arise for the realm of wimmin, her mythical creatures that emerge as amalgamated plant and female forms. The sequence of works in the exhibition establishes timelines of origin, evolution and decay, as well as survival strategies. Framed scenes offer portals into the overarching story, mural compositions display natural specimens that populate this ecosystem, sculptural works portray samplings in autonomous states, and videos capture their interactions. The layout takes viewers through the life cycle of a fictional world, with the promise of renewal contained in the animation Seed Vault (2024), which concludes the visitor experience.

In The Faraway Nearby, essayist Rebecca Solnit describes what stories are and what they may accomplish, stating that “…a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of travelling from here to there.” (1) Any story, no matter how surreal, maps a journey for the reader toward a deeper understanding of their relation to the world, a way of overcoming the distance between self and other. The world issued from Truong’s cutouts, for all its deceptively surreal imagery, may not be that foreign from our own. To borrow a phrase from author Siri Hustvedt, Truong’s protagonists embody “figments […] born of a self- other relation.” (2) They are the artist’s way of making sense of the fraught world we inhabit, while seeking empathy for our more-than-human neighbours. Instead of escape into the supernatural, her work provides a lens to see reality as it could be, as it was always intended: not as a hierarchical universe with man at its centre, measure of all things, subjugating nature to supply his needs, but rather as an interdependent ecosystem where humans are embraced in the interconnectedness of all creatures.

Somewhere in humanity’s history, the quest for knowledge deviated further and further from the goal of social improvement toward a consuming desire for control over nature and a misconceived worship of progress as dominion. Coded in parameters of power and order, a skewed world structure prevailed, asserting the supremacy of what is deemed as rational thought and its taming authority over chaotic, wild nature. Built on difference and division, this dominant world order claimed equivalence between intellect, the domain of the mind, and maleness, assigning nature and the bodily as female territory. This polarizing rift still cuts the world into binary opposites, establishing nature as quintessential otherness and woman as man’s archetypal other. Unsurprisingly, this intent desire for control and regulation extends from nature over to women’s bodies and social roles.

Rather than disputing it, Truong embraces the identification of womanhood with nature and proceeds to untangle it from negative connotations of subservience. With a feminist and environmentalist perspective, she disrupts anthropocentric assumptions as she shapes a world free of dualistic interpretations. Instead of separation and disparity, her universe propagates interdependence. Webs of greenery and arachnoid apparitions emphasize the ecosystem’s reliance on connectivity and cooperation. As anatomical elements emerge from foliage and terrain, what is revealed is not anthropomorphic nature but re-naturalized humans. After all, as Solnit remarks, “…nothing can be crossbred that doesn’t have a common ancestor, and so hybrids simply draw from the wider possibilities that got separated and inbred for a while.” (3) Absorbed in their interiority as much as in their environment – blurring, in fact, such delineations – these creatures dwell unencumbered by shame or prejudice, responsive to no other gaze but their own.

This vision, though it may evoke a notion of paradise before the fall, is not an idyll. Truong intentionally eschews familiar tropes of Western culture: the Arcadian nostalgia for return to a pastoral life, and the utopian dream achievable through human progress by overcoming nature. In her world, neither a looming, all-powerful creator, nor a superior being cultivates the fertile wild. Life self-regenerates from reciprocal interactions and the gentle caress of the breeze. The aster that appears in The Trade (2022) animation and some of the exhibition’s dioramas resembles most the moon, while the quality of light feels nocturnal or consistent with dawn and dusk. The moon has far- reaching associations with the feminine as well, related to fertility cycles, motherhood and nurture. Its teachings, however, encompass more. As historian of religions Mircea Eliade recounts, “It is through the moon’s phases – that is, its birth, death, and resurrection – that men came to know at once their own mode of being in the cosmos and the chances for their survival or rebirth. […] In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, (4) were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. […] what the moon reveals to religious man is not only that death is indissolubly linked with life but also, and above all, that death is not final, that it is always followed by a new birth.” (5)

As systems of belief evolved and shifted, moon gradually became the contrary of sun, which does not share in becoming and remains unchangeable in form. Solar sacred symbolism “gives expression to the religious values of autonomy and power, of sovereignty, of intelligence,” (6) eventually paving the way to rationalist philosophies that discredit obscurity as sheer absence of divine manifestation. Ideologies that relegate darkness to a state of ignorance and inferiority follow in this path. Along with the separation between self and other, Truong dispenses with the dichotomies of light and dark symbolism, bathing her world in the perpetual penumbra of moon glow. She restores a world beyond divisions, made whole again by her attuned act of storytelling. As Indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer points out, “Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. […] for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.” (7) A guiding story of reciprocity and interconnection is utterly needed for the sustained restoration and healing of the earth.

With scientific studies on environmental damage and imminent collapse blatantly ignored in favour of shortsighted economic gain, art may offer an alternative approach to shifting outlooks; it can articulate the necessary story. Humanity’s failure to enact vital shifts of paradigm may often be linked to a failure of imagination accompanied by lack of empathy. As Solnit aptly underlines, “…if environmental problems are really cultural problems – about the nature of our desires and perceptions – then a crucial territory to explore or transform is the territory of the mind…” (8) Artists, as storytellers, envision new models for unsettling an entrenched world order. They show us how to relinquish control over the ecosystem and listen to the land to learn a deeper way of being human.

“Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivalled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship,” (9) suggests Wall Kimmerer. Emulating a scientist’s approach in order to tell her story, Truong commits to the careful documentation of her imagined world. She “collects” a wide sample of specimens, which she displays in the manner of herbaria. Retaining the scientific rigour while breaking formal constraints, she frees her subjects from the page or case frame to form majestic mural compositions and moving re-enactments. She follows the stories of her creatures, immersing herself in their struggles and joys to capture the milestones of their life cycle. And she dedicates her time to recording their existence avoiding intrusion or disturbance. In the process, she builds a world not unlike our own, if only we were to let go of inherited assumptions and restore the relationship of reciprocity with nature, our beyond-human kin.

(1) Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2013), 3.

(2) Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex and the Mind (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 370.

(3) Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art (Athens, GA:University of Georgia Press, 2003), 10.

(4) Latin phrase meaning coincidence of opposites used by 20th-century historian of religion Mircea Eliade to describe “the mythical pattern.”

(5) Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 1987), 156-157.

(6) Ibid, 157.

(7) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 341.

(8) Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, (2003), 2.

(9) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 252.

ABOUT THE ARTIST,
Winnie Truong
(she/her)

Winnie Truong is a Toronto artist working with drawing and collage to explore ideas of identity, feminism, and fantasy along with a digital art and animation practice that includes public art and community engagement. She has exhibited across Canada, the US and Europe with solo presentations at Volta New York Art Fair, Pulse Miami Art Fair and Art Toronto. Truong is a 2017 recipient of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and. Her work can be found in private collections, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas, Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, Bank of Denmark, EQ Bank, Scotiabank Fine Art Collection, RBC Art Collection and TD Bank Corporate Art Collection.