N-O-W-H-E-R-E

For the last five years contemporary Vietnamese photographer, Pipo Nguyen-duy, has been working on two series contemporaneously: East of Eden (2002-present) and The Garden (2004-present). Taking seriously this simultaneity, and taking seriously, too, the artist’s claim that these bodies of work were both inspired by 9/11, my paper asks what it might mean to be both pre and postlapsarian, both in the garden and somehow to its east.

As I argue in my talk, a possible answer to this question can be found by examining a second conflation—that of one-point perspective and photography—which is purposefully foregrounded by Pipo in his relentlessly perspectival photographs of abandoned greenhouses in rural Ohio. How these aesthetic developments might relate to the foundational story of the Expulsion and Fall, and how the whole of this nexus might in turn relate to the events of 9/11 are the questions I see raised by Pipo’s work and, in turn, the questions I seek to explore in this wide-ranging and speculative analysis.

Location: LDSOA, Room 150