OGDEN, UT.- Today, Ogden Contemporary Arts presents two solo exhibitions for artists whose dual cultural identities and journey to American citizenship shape their work and artistic practice. MyLoan Dinh: Unsettled Provisions is presented in OCA’s main gallery, while Nancy Rivera: No Present to Remember occupies the upper gallery. Both shows run from November 3rd, 2023 through January 14th, 2024.

MyLoan Dinh, who was born in Vietnam and is currently based in North Carolina, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reflects on her experiences as a woman of color and former refugee, addressing everyday manifestations of transcultural identity, memory and displacement. Nancy Rivera is a Salt Lake City-based artist whose explorations in photography, fiber and sculpture bridge her roots in Mexico with her life in America. Similar to Dinh, she is interested in exploring her layered identity through the use of juxtaposed materials, memory and hybrid themes that weave together threads of her past and present life.

“We hope this curation sheds light on the experiences of refugees and immigrants as they find a place in our communities, and how that journey affects their lives going forward,” says Venessa Castagnoli, OCA’s Executive Director. “We paired MyLoan Dinh and Nancy Rivera together because their work is family- focused yet also illustrates the artists’ individual journeys of becoming a citizen, both in other parts of the country and here in our home state of Utah.”

The exhibitions open for Ogden’s First Friday Art Stroll on November 3rd, 6-9pm at OCA. On opening night at 6pm, Dinh will present Longing for Harmonies, a public performance piece that will remain part of her show as a virtual installation. Preceding the opening events, the Mary Elizabeth Dee Shaw Gallery hosted an Artist Talk with Dinh at the Kimball Visual Art Center (WSU) on Thursday, November 2nd.

MyLoan Dinh: Unsettled Provisions: MyLoan Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in a traditional Southeast Asian Buddhist household. After fleeing the war-torn country and moving between refugee camps, her family ultimately found a home in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Dinh was educated in the public schools of the predominately Christian South. According to the artist, these geographic, social, cultural, and religious influences shaped her life perspective.

“In this body of work, I offer a contemplative navigation through these interwoven layers,” she says. “My work constructs hybrid spaces within which the ever-changing, always unfinished meanings of identity can be explored, subverted, and reimagined.”

Unsettled Provisions features of a variety of media including painting, sculpture, mixed media, performance and installation. Dinh’s history as a war refugee is threaded throughout, informing her art- making practice. She binds personal narratives to collective experience, referencing the challenges experienced by refugees everywhere such as language barriers, financial setbacks, cultural code shifting, multiple prejudices—even assigned invisibility.

Stories and symbols from her own journey give a more intimate view of the refugee experience. Shredded immigration documents and letters from her parents are reconstituted as slices of pie in The Uncertainty of Nostalgic Things, symbolizing how household items can carry traces of colonial and imperial histories. Other sculptural pieces feature objects such as construction tools and boxing gloves coated in eggshell fragments, symbolizing a fight for new beginnings while referencing traditional craft from her heritage.

Her photo collage series, Baggage Claim, references the plaid fabric of the iconic “migrant bag,” similar to the one her own mother used when fleeing Saigon.

The provisions that Dinh’s mother carried in her migrant bag sustained the family on their uncertain journey. Like her mother, Dinh repurposes provisions of her own making to construct her own space and to amplify her significant voice through this exhibition. These provisions challenge and dismantle falsely- assigned identities and offer means to generate new ways of moving and being.

Nancy Rivera: No Present to Remember: Nancy Rivera is a Salt Lake City-based artist working in photography, fiber and sculpture, creating pieces influenced by her dual cultural identity as Mexican-American. Her subject matter ranges from personal family memories to subversions of government-issued documents, while central themes in her work include code-switching, cultural assimilation and displacement.

For No Present to Remember, Rivera presents a series of soft sculptures that merge the tangible with the metaphorical while also connecting her roots in Mexico with her life in the US. To create the pieces in this series, Rivera prints family photographs on fabric and submerges them in water from the Great Salt Lake or Bonneville Salt Flats. The cloth absorbs the salt as it slowly dries, desaturating the image and creating a malleable yet organic shape. According to the artist, the sculptures can be seen as a metaphor for the flexibility and resilience required in navigating complex memories that fade and shift. While the images themselves appear as moments frozen in time, their process of transformation speak to the fluidity and adaptability of identity.

“This series of work is not only an exploration of physical materials,” says the artist, “but is a journey through the landscape of memory where the interwoven threads of past and present create a tapestry of identity.”

ARTISTS BIOS

MyLoan Dinh was born in Saigon, Vietnam and currently lives in Charlottes, North Carolina. Majoring in visual arts, she studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the School of Arts and Design at Wollongong University New South Wales, Australia. She has exhibited internationally and her work can be found in public and private collections in the United States and Europe including the Muhammad Ali Museum and Center (Louisville, KY), Artfields (Lake City, SC) and the Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, NC). Notable accomplishments include: Museum of Contemporary Art - Arlington 2022 National Biennial, Artfields 2022 2nd Place Jury Prize, 2020 Arts & Science Council Creative Renewal Fellowship, Mint

Museum Constellations Artist, 2020 Charlotte Magazine BOB Best Local Artist, Arts & Science Council Individual Artists Project Grants, Knight Foundation Celebrate Charlotte Grant, McColl Center Residency, Community Impact Grant - Partnership for Democracy, Berlin, Department of Arts and Culture of Berlin Individual Artists grants. She is the founder of an international multidisciplinary arts outreach and migration project, We See Heaven Upside Down. She and her husband, Till Schmidt-Rimpler, founder and artistic director of Moving Poets, have creative projects in the USA and Germany. MyLoan is a mother of two.

Nancy Rivera is a visual artist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her artistic practice weaves together photography, fiber art, and sculpture, whose reciprocal interplay inflects subject matter ranging from personal family memories to subversions of government-issued documents. Influenced by her dual cultural identity, Rivera’s discrete material juxtapositions explore code-switching, cultural assimilation, and displacement—central themes that articulate duality and hybridity.

Rivera has exhibited nationally in a variety of traditional and nontraditional venues including Spring/Break Art Show in Los Angeles, California, Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Granary Arts in Ephraim, Utah. Her work is part of private and public collections such as the Center for Creative Photography, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and the state of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection.