Push & Pull
Wendy Duong and Connor Walden
April 29th - May 21st
Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Push & Pull, an exhibition featuring Wendy Duong and Connor Walden. Push & Pull combines Wendy Duong’s paintings and Connor Walden’s sculptures in a two-person exhibition that makes the tensions of relationships visible. The exhibited works activate each artists’ complex feelings borne by intimate connections with loved ones. Inner worlds are transformed into externalized objects, inviting reflection and connection.
Duong’s paintings depict semi-abstract representations of human figures and flowers that are part of emotionally heightened personal narratives while Walden’s sculptures explore gendered expectations passed down to us by family through the interplay of steel and yarn. While employing different media, both artists approach their art making similarly—with playfulness, letting intuition and impulse drive the creation of dynamic movements with intermingling forms. Pushing and pulling, the primary forces in physics, are foundational forces in relational dynamics as well; the artworks in Push & Pull respond and engage these forces with both tenderness and gravity, inviting the viewer to be drawn in or repelled by what they encounter.
Wendy Duong is a Vietnamese American artist residing in Santa Ana, California. Growing up immersed in American culture while having immigrant parents, Wendy experiences obstacles navigating communication between generations. In result, Wendy uses her artistic practice as a bridge to form universal connections. Portraying human emotions such as grief, regret, guilt, and joy in dramatic narrative acrylic paintings, Wendy unveils peculiarities in the mundane and human relationships.
Raised with a twin brother in a conservative Christian suburb of Dallas, Connor Walden is an artist currently in Los Angeles. After spending his formative years as an adult in the liberal secular cities of Austin and Seattle, Connor finds himself in a state of ambivalence, holding a complex of feelings, ideologies, and communities. In order to continue this dialectic move, Connor’s studio becomes a playground to feel around for common threads and dropped stitches. His current body of work investigates the relationship between steel and yarn, two materials he learned to work with from his grandfather and grandmother, respectively. The gendered expectations fostered by these complimentary people set up a false dichotomy of strength and gentleness he continues to contemplate in his studio and in his life. Connor has exhibited throughout the US, including Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles. He is in collections in California, Washington, and Texas.