Layered

Stand close to one of Lana Nguyen’s desert landscapes and the first thing you notice is that nothing in it was painted where it sits. The red of a butte, the pale ribbon of a wash, the green of a cactus pad, the small violet cloud over a mesa — each is a separate piece of paper. Nguyen paints the paper first, by hand, sheet after sheet, in the colors she wants. Then she cuts. Then she builds: shape over shape, plane behind plane, until a whole desert stands up off the wood panel with real depth between its layers. Last, she pours resin over the finished surface and lets it cure to glass, so that light falls into the piece the way it falls into water.

That is the method. It is also, she says, the meaning.

Layered, her solo exhibition at the Creative Gateways Showroom, brings together seven years of this work — the first time that much of it has hung in one room. Nguyen was born in Kyiv. She is Vietnamese-Ukrainian, trained as a designer, and shaped by more than one country, language, and landscape before she found, in her words, “both home and an artistic identity in Arizona.” The desert was not an obvious place for that to happen. “It can appear harsh and quiet,” she writes of the show, “yet is filled with resilience, color, and life when you look closely.”

“We collect places, experiences, cultures, memories, and versions of ourselves along the way. Nothing exists as a single layer.” — Lana Nguyen

Look closely is the instruction, and the work rewards it. Her Southwest is not the muted, sun-bleached one of postcards. It is cobalt night skies over red rock, hot-pink prickly pear blossoms, gold-leaf moons, an armadillo in blue stripes, a javelina trotting under a crescent moon. A three-panel nocturne nearly six feet wide — Whispers of the Desert I, II, III — puts an agave, a blooming cactus, and a jackrabbit each under the same blue moon, three panels that read as one long breath. A four-panel piece, The Desert Unfolds, runs a line of orange buttes and monsoon clouds across the wall like a landscape seen from a moving car. Five thirty-inch rounds — ocotillo, blooming prickly pear, a javelina’s garden — hang like portholes onto the same country. And in one piece, Where Travelers Pause, something hovers over the buttes that was not in any field guide. Nguyen has a sense of humor about belonging. Visitors from somewhere else are welcome here.

Most of these seven years were made in small pieces of time. When Creative Gateways profiled Nguyen last fall, the detail that stuck was a baby monitor on the studio table. She works from a backyard studio — a “five-second commute” — and for a long stretch the question that shaped her practice was a practical one: what can I make in two and a half hours while my daughter naps? The answer, it turned out, was a discipline. Paper is patient. A cut shape waits. A piece can be built in layers because it has to be — a little at a time, over weeks, each session adding something to what was already there. The constraint that should have slowed the work is the reason it looks the way it does.

Which is what she means by the title. “Created primarily from hand-painted and hand-cut paper, each piece begins in fragments,” she writes. “Color, texture, and individual shapes are cut apart and assembled layer by layer until they become landscapes, desert flora, insects, and other familiar inhabitants of the Southwest. That process mirrors the story behind the work.” A life assembled from pieces that did not start out together. A desert that turned out to be home. Layered, she says, “is both a reflection on that journey and a celebration of what can happen when seemingly separate pieces are allowed to become part of the same story.”

The Showroom runs one artist at a time, one immersive collection, for the length of a season — and this fall it belongs to Nguyen. The exhibition opens on the evening of Thursday, October 1, with the artist in the room, and runs through Thanksgiving Day.

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