Winnie Truong | Curious Nature

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Winnie Trung, “Hive,” 2021

(courtesy of the Gallery)

Curious Nature expands on the intersectionality of the feminine form within landscapes, both real and imagined. The exhibition features Truong’s characteristic dioramas alongside new sculptural forms, stop motion animations and a site-specific ephemeral wall installation.

Taking place on simultaneously fertile and treacherous grounds, the works explore harmony, conflict, and play between a figure and its environment, as well as the tension that arises when the natural world traverses the supernatural. Intertwining these two realities opens up opportunity for transgression and for the creation of new realms from which we can consider a subversion of the idea of a natural order and its narrow perceptions of women’s bodies and identities. Evolving the medium of drawing beyond the conventional static image, and teasing the limits of scale are Truong’s ongoing explorations in ephemera and animation. In the manner of pressed flower collections, her wall installations are composed of individual elements of cut paper pinned delicately along a vast space, allowing viewers to explore an uncanny codex of figures, botanicals and creatures. The same hand-drawn floral and figurative collages are laboriously moved frame-by-frame to produce looping meditative large-scale projections. Both these topographies of expanded practice venture beyond the container of the frame and respond to their setting while championing new ways of physically engaging with drawing-based work unfettered by space and time for a fully immersive viewing experience.

Troung’s work provides the imaginary viewpoint of a feminist natural historian from another realm, one who undertakes their labour with great detail and care to depict the part-flora, part-creature figures by observing them in their natural environments devoid of the male presence or familiar social or biological guidelines. As these unashamed subjects shun the viewer’s gaze; they are given their own notions of agency, beauty, sensuality and purpose. These figures are seen contorted, frolicking, consuming, nurturing, conquering, and entangled in environments where you are unsure where limb ends and leaf begins.