If Revolution is a Sickness
2020 - Photography (Photography)
Unframed dimensions: 38.1 x 25.4 cm
Diane Severin Nguyen
To produce her photo and film works, Diane Severin Nguyen makes amalgam sculptures from found materials, both natural and synthetic. She captures these ephemeral constructions at close range, enlarging minute tensions. Nguyen uses transient, prosthetic lighting—the glow of sunset, an iPhone flash, battery-powered LEDs, fire—so that the camera intervenes moments before these temporary arrangements and their lighting change. The results pinpoint an ineffable moment in time, when subject and matter linger in a state of transformation, growth, or decay, suggesting a body rendered unstable. If Revolution is a Sickness considers how we have co-developed with the ubiquitous presence of photography and its evolving technology in our everyday life. Nguyen examines the political ramifications of images and their resonance, especially in the rapidly changing climate in which she made the work (i.e., the early stages of the global pandemic and social-distancing orders). She often employs gloves in her images, albeit not easily recognizable, submerged in liquid and revealing just the contours of fingers. Gloves are of particular interest to her as they represent the mediation of touch and perhaps even empathy, regimes of care but also fear of contact, wetness, and the thin layers of skin that separate vulnerable interiors from the world. In this body of work Nguyen actively punctures, pierces, and allows leaks of her materials as she captures them.
Diane Severin Nguyen collects found objects and organic matter to craft the images in her photographs and video works. Her work transforms substances found in quotidian domestic spaces to evoke the body rendered unstable. Nguyen’s materials are often plant-based, coagulating, metallic, and wet. She focuses on matter in states of transformation, such as the moment when it is decisively caught—frozen—and intentionally captures an in-betweenness that can be expressed as physical tension or irresolute states. The results are gut-wrenching, uncanny compositions: they evoke something unseeable, such as the “architecture of emotions”, but also very real bodily functions. Nguyen is interested in the journalistic moment of photography, while also considering how the journalistic takes on a highly specific meaning within photography; it is inseparable from the violent history of capturing ‘source material’.
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