Through lofty graffiti-smudged windows at One Grand Gallery in NE Portland, a spectacle of rugs splatter the walls and floor. The textiles take shape in whimsically exaggerated anatomies and bursting stars of color: a splayed-out screamer suspended in motion, an NBA star clad in Trailblazer gear and a tattooed Portlander equipped with Liquid Death and Montucky Cold Snack.
The collection is vibrant, amusing, novel and playful. Moreover, each piece is packed with socially symbolic images—internet memes, pop culture icons and mass media associations. A common thread weaves through the work of this collection, lending to the critical social discourse for which the exhibition is named: How We Hegemony.
This is Los Angeles-based textile artist Angela Anh Nguyen’s first solo exhibition and will be open to the public by appointment (@onegrandgallery on Instagram) until May 16.
“I take my boyfriend’s clothes, and I put them on the bed, and I lay them flat and fold them in different ways and kind of collage them together,” Nguyen described her creative process. “So that’s why it kind of looks like splatters because I literally just lay it on the floor, and it looks very flat, but I think it’s really fun.”
Self-taught in her craft and thoughtful in her delivery, Nguyen sources her yarn from domestic, independent farms. Being that the textile industry is saturated with rapid commercialized production, Nguyen’s personal and localized approach to tufting underscores the exhibition’s resistance to the capitalistic demands of art production.
“The keyword of the show is hegemony,” Nguyen explained. “Which is essentially power imbalances and the way that people follow a sort of status quo due to systems of power.”
Nguyen located her work at an intersection between Los Angeles arts and entertainment culture and various social theorists—she cited Antonio Gromsci, Walter Benjamin and Louis Pierre Althusser. Indeed, How We Hegemony is a collage of cultural snippets, interweaving to form a cohesive narrative about themes such as hyperconsumerism, capitalist exploitation and Hollywood’s propagation of neocolonialist ideology and structural violence.
And yet, for all that it is sociologically theoretical, politically intricate and intellectually rigorous, Nguyen is an artist concerned as much with her work’s accessibility as with its substantive inquiry.
“I want there to be accessibility in terms of observance and critical analysis within one’s own accord,” Nguyen said. “I feel like I don’t really need to explain it because when you look at it, you completely understand it.”
Two pieces that certainly live up to this sentiment, “BEAT! UP!” and “Agenda, AGENDA, AGENDA!!!!!” both feature a boxing bout encircled by a chaotic mishmash of words and images. “Both of these rugs work synonymously,” Nguyen said. “It’s two people beating each other up, like how we feel beat up by media framing and agenda setting.”
Details fringing the rugs include the twin towers, Zelenskyy, “Are there 61 Marvel movies?”, Michael Bay, “$7.25 an hour,” a Quora search bar reading “Why is Tesla’s quality so bad when it’s so expensive?” and a Negroni Sbagliato. With content traversing the utterly distressing to the chaotically comical, viewing How We Hegemony is ultimately a practice of personal interpretation.
Another piece within the exhibition, “Counter culture among other things…” accessorizes two clasping figures, one with an eccentric goose purse and the other with a bright red mohawk. The two personages are sewn together by literary covers steeped in the consequences of modern institutionalized powers: Pierre Bourdieu’s The Algerians, Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, bell hooks’ All about Love and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. From colonialism to capitalism to patriarchy, the ideological pillars which serve today’s hegemons are the heart of suffering across these titles.
Thus, despite the nonconformist appearance of Nguyen’s personages, they are inseparable from, literally sewn to, the blanket fabric of dominant conformity. This piece, Nguyen explained, is “a critique on counter-culture and how that sort of lives in the world of hegemony. I think that naturally there are like hegemonic norms that even people who involve themselves in counter-culture follow.”
Within her specialty, Nguyen displays a conscious deconstruction of the hegemonic norms dictating today’s art world. “Hegemony in fine art is, you know, a piece should sit centered on the wall, and we should gaze at it and not touch it,” Nguyen said.
Contemporary fine art is quite literally out of reach for the vast majority of people. How We Hegemony gaps the distance between art and observer not only in terms of comprehension but in terms of physical space. Nguyen encourages onlookers to touch the work, to reimagine its orientation and to live with the rug as truly a rug.
“Something I wanted to highlight was the imperfection of the install,” Nguyen said. “In order to encourage agency with the client who either buys the work or the observer—the art consumer.” With rugs on the floor, on the walls, upside down and burrowed in corners, the exhibition urges viewers to reevaluate the constructs of art consumption, to reimagine the constructs of art itself.
Nguyen advocates for the freedom of authentic creative expression. How We Hegemony resists the politics of prestige within fine art and defies a market-imposed aesthetic criterion exclusionary to the non-elite. “I don’t think we should be guided by capitalism in an art market,” Ngyuen said. “Like to have to make something a certain way in order to make money. I think that’s such bullshit. I think that’s just not what art is.”
Even if art cannot completely escape the pervasive reach of capitalist hegemony, as “Counter culture among other things…” would seem to suggest, it must not surrender in total complicity to the moral decay and class-based marginalization inherent to the current hegemonic order.
Heartening to this end is the deliberate production and humorous originality manifest in How We Hegemony. “I want to be taken seriously as an artist, on top of being funny,” Nguyen said. “We’ll see if that’s possible, but I’ve gotten support, and that’s all that matters. I’m happy to be showing here and creating stuff that people can laugh at and smile at.”
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For readers who’d like to see the exhibit in person, visit One Grand Gallery – 1000 E Burnside St.
