Bio
Van (rhymes with "fun") C. Tran uses overhead projectors to display “shadow poems” based off her relational experiences of the everyday. She received her MFA in Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the recipient of various awards from the Central Coast: Isla Vista Arts, Friday Academy, and smART families from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited in the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara (now MCASB), alternative spaces in Los Angeles, and San Diego Space 4 Art, an artists’ warehouse. A former transplant and artist educator in San Diego, CA, Van now currently lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Artist's Statement
I believe the arts have the capacity to embed itself within a broader social realm as current social conditions render a new kind of creative practice: research. My relationship with the arts which I have often treated with reflection and exploration, is one that I envision with further potential to be an intersecting vehicle between the informal and the contemporary.
My research begins in various informal interventions that are often performative and/or participatory. These lead to an end product of visual display; the inter-media forms an output of "shadow poems" that are sequenced video recordings of projected shadows layered over images. I take interest in the idea of place/displacement which are inseparable with relationships, as an ongoing part of my research and examination of the everyday. The connections that are made both socially and spatially, between the artist and participant, forges a specific experience which I have incorporated into my method of visualization and illustration. From a range of studies, my goal is to collect information from these experiences and re-imagine place as a playground for multiple possibilities and a refuge from the place itself.