The Westside Rifle & Pistol Range

New York-based artist Alison Nguyen will host the closing party for her exhibit "The Kisses & Guns Show" at The West Side Rifle & Pistol Range. In this site-specific body of work, sequences of her distinctive "Kisses and Guns"--kiss-stained, bullet-hole riddled targets--rapidly line the walls of the gun range's narrow hallway entrance. The artist works in an array of media including photography, silkscreen, and text, often integrating non-traditional tools in her process. Including: lips and pistols.

For the closing event (to be held after Range hours) dozens of images from Nguyen's photographic portrait series "Crimes of Passion & Other Abstractions" will hang from target clips in the actual firing range. Viewers are allowed to wander about the repositioned space to see the photos of her kiss-stained subjects layered at various depths of field.

Nguyen's work in "Crimes of Passion" turns several contradictions in the photographic medium into animating points of tension. Her images occupy an an unstable territory: the ever-shifting space between narration, documentation, and abstraction. Lipstick stains adorn her subjects--as painterly strokes, as sultry stains of ephemeral affairs, as documentation of bruises, or lacerations, as residue, and, indeed, as evidence of sensual delight…

Not without humor, Nguyen rejects the notion that the photographic image offers an analogue to reality or that it "prints" a memory. She skillfully directs the power of the medium's inherent uncertainty to create conceptually rich, stunning images. What is inside each of Nguyen's frames also evokes fantasy of that which is outside of it. Traces are undefined absences/presences. In this provocative arrangement of work, Alison Nguyen reveals spaces in between "kisses" and "guns" where visceral desires exist in indeterminate states, refusing to settle.

Alison Nguyen graduated from Brown University in 2009. She currently works in New York as a photographer and designer. She has been shooting guns at the Westside Rifle & Pistol Range for several years and is proud to bring her art to the space. You can check out more of her work at www.kissesandguns.com.

For press inquiries or to schedule a studio visit please contact Alison Nguyen directly: alison.c.nguyen@gmail.com