Artist talk by Erin O’Brien

Sun 10 Jan, 6 pm
Nha San Duc

Join us for a talk by Erin O’Brien, one of the four amazing female artists who made up ‘Half of the Sky’ last November at Galerie Quynh. O’Brien holds an MFA in Studio Art/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a Vietnamese-Irish American interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and popular educator, who is now working and living in Saigon.

I use performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland”. As a mixed race child of Vietnamese immigrant mother and an Irish-American father, who was a career diplomat, my sense of home has always been fluid and ever changing. I was conceived in Vietnam and born in the U.S. In a sense, I was exiled before I was born and lived most of my life as an ex-patriot. My art practice is about exploring these disjointed identities that co-exist in my body and this ever-present search for home. More than the emotional and physical sense of home, I am interested in the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and spirituality shape this construct. Through my work, I investigate issues such as war and memory, transnational identity and belonging, and multiple identities and its attendant baggage…

Erin O’Brien

Please click here to read the rest of the artist statement.