Alison Nguyen Kisses & Guns Show closing event

Alison Nguyen: The Kisses & Guns Show
Closing Reception: Saturday, September 18th 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM

LOCATION:
The Westside Rifle & Pistol Range
20 W. 20th Street
downstairs shooting gallery
New York, NY 10011


New York-based artist Alison Nguyen will host a closing party for her exhibit "The Kisses & Guns Show" at The West Side Rifle & Pistol Range. The artist works in an array of media including photography, silkscreen, and text, often integrating non-traditional tools in her process. Including: lips and pistols.

In this site-specific body of work, sequences of her iconic "Kisses and Guns"–kiss stains on targets riddled with bullet holes–rapidly line the narrow hallway entrance to the gun range. For the closing event (held after Range hours) Nguyen will hang dozens of images from her photographic portrait series "Crimes of Passion & Other Abstractions" from target clips in the actual firing range. Viewers can wander through the space to see the photos of her kiss-stained subjects layered at various depths of field.

Nguyen's work in "Crimes of Passion" reflect certain contradictions in the photographic medium. Her images occupy an ever-shifting space between narration, documentation, and abstraction. The lipstick stains on her subjects at times appear as painterly strokes, as sultry stains of ephemeral affairs, as documentation of bruises, or lacerations, as residue, as evidence of sensual delight…

Not without humor, Nguyen rejects the notion that the photographic image is an analogue to reality or that it "prints" a memory. Her series underscores the power of the medium's inherent uncertainty. The images inside each of Nguyen's frames also evoke fantasy of that which is outside of it. Traces are undefined absences/presences. In this provocative arrangement of work, Alison Nguyen reveals spaces in between "kisses" and "guns" where visceral desires exist in indeterminate states, refusing to settle.

Alison Nguyen graduated from Brown University in 2009. She currently works in New York as a photographer and designer. She has been shooting guns at the Westside Rifle & Pistol Range for several years and is proud to bring her art to the space. You can find more of her work at www.kissesandguns.com.