Francis Irv
Wed - Sat 12pm to 6pm
Minh-Lan Tran
Devotion disorder
January 22 - March 1, 2025
Reception: Wednesday, January 22nd, 12:18 am - 8:00 pm
Francis Irv is pleased to announce the opening of Minh-Lan Tran’s Devotion disorder on January 22nd from 6-8 PM. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and first in New York.
Unseen forces pull us in various directions, enticing us one way while often steering us onto alternate routes, yet they are rarely described. Minh Lan Tran endeavors to give shape to these forces to bring them to rest. Utilizing egg, pigment, and chalk, the artist creates her own paint through a process inspired by traditional techniques from early Byzantine icon paintings—an era when theories about images and the ethics of depicting the divine were first explored. She then dismantles these methods by tearing, burning, and challenging her surfaces, which resemble the slits of a veil.
Tran's titles evoke images of internal organs and fault lines on the body, symbolizing what emerges after cataclysmic events fracture the mind. Engaging in a politics of expression, the artist seeks to restore the power to signify, creating an expression of experience through experience. She listens for the divine utterance she aims to manifest, exploring the connection between the flesh and the idea, between the image and the spirit revealed by experiences of the visible world. If consciousness serves as a shield against the wound that defines desire and existence, this absence is beyond representation; it is only ever depicted as a reflection on a veil. - Hiji Nam
