As an artistically inclined teenager feeling bored and marooned in the suburb of Vadnais Heights, Minnesota, Mel Nguyen did what any millenial in her situation would do: She turned to the internet for creative stimulation. “Even as a high schooler I was looking at all these graphic design blogs, seeing how the field was changing, and thinking, wow,” she says. As soon as she enrolled as an art student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, she started her own tumblr, showing off her experiments sliding from 2-D into to 3-D and back again. She managed to build such a following on the site that her work went viral in certain online art and design circles — so much so that it’s hard to believe she’s only 21, and won’t graduate until this spring.
It’s not at all hard to believe, on the other hand, that she found success on tumblr, of all places: Her work shares not only the site’s aesthetic but its stream-of-consciousness approach. “My practice has a lot to do with chain reactions and triggers,” Nguyen explains. “I’m triggered by materials or imagery, and then once I’ve done something, I find what interests me about it and move on to explore that. It’s a series of connected experiments: If A leads to B, then what about this other thing?” The same formula applies to her physical process as well. For a recent project, which dealt with the idea of objects whose forms imply a function they don’t necessarily possess, she began by making small, vague items resembling material tests, then photographed them, then made printed cutouts of them, which she integrated into another piece.
That project also explored her current fascination with prototypes, models, and retail display tactics, which can manifest in her installations as elements that look unfinished or fake, or that are hung from department store–style grid walls, even when they don’t resemble anything that would typically be for sale. “I’m interested in the line between a prototype and a completed product, and in the backend of production and staging,” Nguyen says. “Everything I make is trying to explore the structural possibilities between art and design, trying to find my way between them.” We sent photographer Debbie Carlos to her Minneapolis studio to take a closer look.
Artist Mel Ngyuen in her current studio: an 8×11-foot room at her school, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, from which she’ll graduate this spring.
“My first year in school, I realized that I had more fun experimenting between mediums, and trying to subvert each one,” says the 21-year-old. “I already had an interest in graphic design in high school, and then I started making 3-D work with the facilities at MCAD, which combined with photography, has led to my current work.”
A panel of Plexiglas Nguyen painted and used as a backdrop for a clay composition. “The clay pieces are experiments in form,” she explains. “I’m interested in how they naturally create this bacterial imagery. The forms and colors merge into each other, and then I cut them apart again. It’s something I do as a quick exercise between projects. It turns into a photo, I reuse the clay, and nothing exists after the photo.”
“I always start with materials,” she adds. “Some are found manufactured forms like metal racks, and I also use a lot of particle board, for an internal-structure vibe. I collect a lot of marble swatches and carpet swatches too.”
The small white ramp on the floor is one of Nguyen’s recent series of objects that imply a certain function, but don’t actually have one. To the left is a folded sheet that she spraypainted objects on and plans to reuse in another piece. “I save everything I use, because sometimes it turns into another project,” she says. “I’m always using the remnants of one thing to create another thing. Nothing’s ever done.”
Spilling out from underneath her desk is a pile of wood and foam scraps and shapes that speak to her current interest in models and prototypes. The item slung over her chair is a piece of fabric she covered in acrylic paint, scanned, printed, and framed, blurring the line between two dimensions and three.
At center, another part from the same project. At left, a tarp she spraypainted and used as a surface for displaying objects on, then later cut into the approximate form of a shirt. “I like making these ambiguous forms that look like they’re things unfolded, or cross sections, or cutouts,” she says. “They should make something, but you don’t really know what.”
More recombined remnants from other works. “Even though I look online pretty often and there’s this quickness to my work, I’m suspicious of it too. So I like to hold onto things and pause a lot, to make sure I know I’m not just doing a formal experiment but expressing the ideas I’m interested in.”
Marble swatches, acrylic swatches, and scraps. “I use the swatches in installations, and sometimes I’ll scan them for patterns, backgrounds, and textures I can manipulate visually,” Nguyen says.
Wall molding samples she’s cut and painted. Plus more material swatches “for your kitchen or whatever,” she says. “Weird outdated plastic laminates.”
A close-up of the laminate swatches. “I love the abstract shapes they form,” she says.
Nguyen created this thin wood frame on the wall as an experimental display tactic, the seed of an idea for a photo background containing a drilled-and-pencilled grid meant to track scale changes across a series of images.
One of the non-functional pyramid models under Nguyen’s desk, which is coated in primer. “I’ve been using primer a lot lately because I’m interested in something being primed for the next step, and yet it doesn’t go there,” she says. “We project onto it the next step, or how it might be part of something bigger.”
“I’m still trying to make sure I have an in-depth history of art so I’m not repeating everything or being uninformed,” says Nguyen. On this shelf are books on Richard Tuttle, Mel Bochner, Artepovera, and Swiss typography. “My work has a lot of ties to ’80s graphic design, but with a different attitude and using multiple languages.”
Her sketchbook, whose cover she painted. “It was this ugly notebook but I wanted to use the gridded pages,” she says.
Evidence of Nguyen’s penchant for painting, spraypainting, and sawing wood (ouch). When constructing her 3-D forms se doesn’t use any fancy techniques, just basic cutting and basic math.
A series of small sculptures from an installation that became a series of photographs. Nguyen considers them “still in the prototype stage.”
More from the same series, including some fake rocks she made from spraypainted metal. Nguyen says she’s especially interested in wedges as a metaphor, “how they can stop something moving or go underneath something.”
The prototype aspect of these panels lies in the fact that none of them are permanently connected to each other or attached to the wall. Nguyen photographs them, rearranges them, then photographs them again. They also capture her interest in set design and display. “They’re almost like a tiny stage,” she says. “It’s about the fakeness, the presentation, the mockup.”
More shapes covered in primer.
A metal rod Nguyen spraypainted and bent into an impromptu rainbow that pins a small piece of wood to the wall.
These shapey objects are also easily disassembled and reassembled into something new. Nguyen sees parallels between Bochner’s work and her interest in unfinished pieces. Her other influences include Wolfgang Weingart, the Bauhaus, Nicole Killian, Travis Stearns, and Memphis design.
Another view of the same series.
Nguyen incorporates many found objects into her work, like this tiny foam soccer ball she spraypainted and placed atop a stack of spraypainted furniture-leg cushions.
This sculpture was inspired by the form of a podium, and like most of Nguyen’s objects, it’s hollow and open in back, so there’s a “frontal staging thing going on.”
Nguyen isn’t yet sure what she’d like to do after she graduates, but she knows she’s ready to leave Minneapolis. “It feels really isolated, smack dab in the middle of the US,” she says. “Not too many things happen here. It’s really just a starting point for me.”
“Being a photographer and being an artist working with materials like resin, plants, and glass — those two worlds should not really mix,” says Heidi Norton. “You have the camera and you have film and you’re trying to keep things clean and archival, and then you have dirt and glass shards everywhere.” Such contradictions are at the core of Norton’s work, from the immaculate glow of her photography to the dirt-under-your-fingernails feel of her sculptural pieces, which typically feature houseplants in some form or another. Norton started incorporating plants into her photographic practice several years ago in a series of still lifes. It was partly a way to bring the natural world she grew up with, in rural West Virginia, into the urban setting of Chicago, where she’s lived since getting her MFA at the School of the Art Institute in 2002. Those photos eventually inspired her to make plant-based sculptures that explore how we create, cultivate, and change ourselves. Therein lies the central paradox: “The idea of preservation, and trying to save the plant while at the same time killing it through that preservation, became really interesting to me,” she says. “All of the mediums I use deal with that idea in different ways.” Even her studio itself, shot by Debbie Carlos for part two of Sight Unseen's series on Chicago artists, is part of the process.
As a four-year-old living in Lenoir, South Carolina, Stephen Eichhorn refused to learn how to read. While everyone else in his class was singing their ABCs, he’d stubbornly deemed it unnecessary — he already knew he was destined to be an artist, communicating through images rather than words. “People asked me, how are you going to read your show cards or write press releases?” Eichhorn recalls. “My answer was, I’m going to marry someone who knows how to read! The resistance was so heavy they put me in a special ed class.” His protest didn’t last more than a few months, luckily, but his uncanny commitment to his future career did: At 14, for example, he interned for a group of Star Wars toymakers who taught him freehand drafting and craft techniques, and at 17 he attended a summer art program at SAIC before enrolling there a year later. Since graduating in 2006 he’s been living the dream instead of planning for it, working independently from a studio he shares with his wife in Chicago, which is where SU’s newest contributor Debbie Carlos visited him this past spring for our two-part series on Windy City artists.
It’s not every day that one of our subjects answers the phone by giddily announcing she’s just opened the mail to find the Legend soundtrack she ordered and proclaiming that 1985 Tom Cruise fantasy flick to be her favorite movie. But then San Francisco artist Sarah Applebaum has always tended to march to the beat of her own drum: Paying no mind when her work meanders back and forth between craft and art, she mostly uses dime-store materials like yarn, papier mâché, and felt. Unlike most crafters, she often turns those materials into three-dimensional symbols plucked from her subconscious. And yet unlike most artists, she's self-taught with a degree in politics, sells her objects at Jonathan Adler and in her own online shop, moonlights as a personal chef, and isn’t at all goal-oriented when it comes to gallery shows. When Applebaum makes things, alone in her home studio in the Lower Haight, it’s above all for making’s sake.
