Hương Ngô: Core Memory
On view: September 27 - January 26, 2025
Opening Reception: October 26, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Artist Talk: October 26, 5:30 pm
RSVP: development@mcasantabarbara.org
Funk Zone Live Receptions: Friday, September 27 and Friday, December 6, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Hương Ngô: Core Memory is an exhibition that synthesizes the artist’s reflections on her family's time in refugee camps in Hong Kong and their experiences as new immigrants in the US. Woven throughout the exhibition is a series of cyanotypes created solely from sunlight and water at the edge of a body of water. An image of the weather and waves of the day, they are also stand-ins for the refugee body, battered by the elements and an artifact of their resilience.
These cyanotypes lead to the most recent body of work that is inspired by the artist's desire to learn about her parents’ labor as assembly line workers in electronics factories, a common occupation amongst this demographic of Southeast Asian Refugees. At these factories, her parents created capacitors, resistors, and motherboards – components which modulate tempo, pitch, and memory in electronics. Using these vintage components, she creates circuits as sculptures that gesture towards her parents' creativity, efforts not legible in the output of their wage labor.
Elsewhere, Ngô includes embroidered core memory using ferrite core and conductive thread and copper on diaphanous silk organza. Core memory, the method of binary memory storage before semiconductors, is transformed through embroidery, taught to Ngô by her mother as her first art form. Here, memory is physical, bodily, deeply resonate, and difficult to forget.
These works were made with the support of the Camargo Foundation, Lucas Artists Residency Program, 3Arts Chicago, Artist Communities Alliance, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid - Chicago.
Hương Ngô is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She was born in Hong Kong and works between Santa Barbara, and Chicago. Ngô holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art & Technology Studies (2004) and was a Whitney Independent Study Fellow (2011-2012). She was awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) for work that has been described as "deftly and defiantly decolonial" by New City and "what intersectional feminist art looks like'' by the Chicago Tribune.
She has exhibited her solo and collaborative work at numerous institutions including more recently: Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO (2024); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023); Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO (2022), CAC Cincinnati, OH (2021); Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); The Factory Contemporary Art Centre, HCMC, VN (2020); Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2020); Phillips Collection, Washington DC (2019); MoMA, New York, NY (2018); Para Site, Hong Kong, SAR (2017); DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2017); Nhà Sàn Collective, Hanoi, VN (2016). Her collaboration with Hồng-Ân Trương is on long-term display at Chicago O'Hare's International Airport, and her work is part of the permanent collections of the MoMA, DePaul Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, and Walker Art Center, among others. Visit the artist’s website at www.huongngo.com.
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) seeks to enrich lives and inspire critical thinking through meaningful engagement with the art and ideas of our time. MCASB provides Santa Barbara and the Central Coast with exhibitions and programming that encourage discovery, cultivate new perspectives, and challenge the way we see and experience the world, ourselves, and each other.
The MCASB Satellite at Hotel Indigo program started in 2013 and presented annual exhibitions through 2017. MCASB Satellite at the Riviera Beach House began in 2024 with the exhibition Changing Nature: recent work by Stephanie Dotson and Madeleine Ignon, and is now programmed through an annual call for entries for proposals by artists living and working between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, with a jury of regional art professionals. The full 2024/25 program will be announced shortly.
The 2024/25 program jury included: Terra Cobian, Artist & Non-Profit Professional; Dalia Garcia, Co-Executive Director, MCASB; Debra Herrick, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief Lum Art Magazine; Arturo Heredia Soto, Co-Founder and Art Designer Lum Art Magazine; Fabián Leyva-Barragán, Co-Executive Director, MCASB; Maya Mallik, Hotelier, Riviera Beach House.
The Riviera Beach House is an artful boutique hotel situated steps from the sand in Santa Barbara’s eclectic Funk Zone neighborhood. The newly redesigned property has become a destination where people gather to enjoy curated experiences, explore local culture, and embrace the Riviera lifestyle. Maya Mallick, owner of The Riviera Beach House, is passionate about design and embraces art as an intrinsic part of the hotel experience.