Art Around Athens

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is hosting the second of its Visiting Artist Lectures (the first having been Jim Fiscus) at 5:30 p.m. tonight in Room S151 (one of the auditoriums).

Pipo Nguyen-duy, born in Hue, Vietnam in 1962, received a master's degree of fine arts in photography from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1998. The artist lives in Ashland, Oregon, and teaches in Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, where he is associate professor of photography. His work has been shown internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Light Work Gallery in New York, The Faaborg Museum in Denmark, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.

You can see a wide selection of Nguyen-duy's work on his Web site.The image above is from his series "AnOther Western," which he describes as follows:

AnOther Western began after the consideration for the immediate geographical, historical and cultural significance of the site to be an integral part of my the visual research. Although AnOther Western, which also deals with race and gender within the context of cultural assimilation, the project’s focus shifts from European High Culture to the American West. In this site-specific work, 19th century photographic syntax is utilized to reinterpret and to simulate tintype portraits made in the West during late 1800's. In these new self-portraits, the Asian immigrant take on new roles as gunslingers, musicians and gentlemen. By consciously assuming culturally powerful icons, and not the assumed stereotypical representations of Asian as the submissive other (i.e. opium addicts, domestic servants) AnOther Western intends to humorously and ironically question and challenge the legitimacy and authority of the western myth.

Mark your calendar now for Michael Fried on Oct. 20.