Open April 6 – May 7.

Art Gym is excited to present “DSPRS” a solo exhibition of new work from member Nam Nghiem on view in The Leyden Jar. Please join us and the artist for a reception on Thursday April 6 from 6-9PM. Thank you to Ratio Beerworks for providing beer for this event!

“My abstract work is produced at the intermediate areas of formula and chance, the mechanical and the physical, abstraction and representation. The work is produced by a strategy, often using everyday visual occurrences as a starting point. The appropriated images then go through (mis)handling of different means of mechanical processes (e.g. inkjet printer) and digital processes until their original meanings are dissolved and create unforeseen abstractions. These results are finally realized and multiplied by methods of silkscreen where they transform into their final configurations, massreproducible and infinitely mutable. However, forms are given improper functions, lines are dissociated from their original gestures, results are indecipherable in terms of their origins. The system in which they normally function is questioned. Conditioning the image in this manner raises questions of our own conditioning regulated by unstable constructs of reality and belief in this age of simulation often oversaturated by media and technologies. The relentless repetition of the image refers to an exacerbation of this state of closed loop system where significations are inversed, and the lost-origin signifiers only refer to nothing but itself, Repetition to me, however on a personal level, as physiological practices (eg. meditation, working out) and aesthetic preferences lays closer to the meditative qualities that I believe to have the capacities to restore awareness to the subject itself. In this facet of repetition, here lies our prospects for transcendence.”

Nam Nghiem (b. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) is a Denver-based multimedia artist making work by using digital processes and different methods of printmaking and painting. He got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2014 he was an artist in residency at New York Academy of Art. Nghiem had his first solo show in 2015 and has exhibited in several group shows in Georgia, Colorado, US; Hochiminh City, Vietnam and Cairo, Egypt.