08 MARCH THRU 28 APRIL 2024
WINNIE TRUONG
Winnie Truong, Slow Drip, drawing and cut paper collage on panel, 2023, 24″x20″
VIVIANEART is proud to present an exhibition of all new works by Canadian artist Winnie Truong. Titled Second Nature, this series continues Truong’s near decade long practice of working with pencil crayon drawings and cut paper to create intricately collaged environments. Influenced by fantasy, surrealism and the grotesque, these environments contain hybrid forms, part plant and part body. Unnerving and undeniably alluring, Truong’s works continue to challenge our views of the feminine. They offer a window into a subversion of the idea of a natural order and our perceptions of women’s bodies and identities.
The exhibition’s title, Second Nature, is an intriguing double entendre. In the world of philosophy, second nature is spoken of in relation to reason vs. nature. It is understood as an embedded way of seeing and being: a cognition that appears automatic and is attributed in large part to the influences of the traditions we are raised in and around. For Truong, her art is largely focused on disrupting these ingrained ways of seeing and being. Her Second Nature refers to a nature of her own creation. A new nature, a fantastical space where the rules and traditions no longer make sense.
Winnie Truong graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design (2010) and has received numerous grants and awards including the W.O. Forsyth Award, the 401 Richmond Career Launcher Prize, and the BMO 1st! Art award. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Among her recent exhibition accolades she was featured in a solo exhibition at SAW Gallery, Ottawa in 2020 and in 2023 was in presentations at both The Varley and The McMichael Canadian Art Collection. From April to August, 2024 she will have a solo exhibition of works at Contemporary Calgary. She is represented internationally in private and public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, Ottawa, EQ Bank Toronto, the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas, and the Bank of Denmark, Copenhagen among others.
