Free Association: 1: Arnis Balcus

chezTGN presents the first installment of Free Association, a series of art exhibits accompanied by a loose "soundtrack" culled from a guest curator's collection of music. It is not music "composed" for art, per se, but more of a casual approach akin to coming home, looking around one's apartment - and in this case, the art on the walls -, throwing in a cd that fits the mood, and crafting what and how one wants to feel while letting the "collaboration" stew itself into something else altogether. And this is all the more appropriate since chezTGN is literally artist and curator Trong G. Nguyen's apartment.

Nguyen opens his housewarming with the photographs of Arnis Balcus, a 25 year old Latvian artist living and working in Riga. This is his first exposure to a New York City audience. Balcus photographs himself, his friends, and his lovers in everyday moments of intimacy, playfulness, and uneventful leisures. In Balcus' large snapshot documents, red eye and all, theirs is a down-at-home cosmopolitan youth culture characterized by insular aplomb and in these pictures at least, underdress. We might identify this generational segment as post-Soviet Unions's young, uninhibited, attractive, and hip.

Balcus, who first exhibited his photographs in a museum show at the age of 16 and shows regularly in Europe, works in the tradition of photographers who focus the camera on their own generation, including Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, and more recently, Ryan McGinley. Like them, he uses photography to "break down barriers between public and private spheres of activity with a frank self-awareness that is distinctly contemporary. The camera is both a part of their lives and an accomplice in the construction of the world they wish to create for themselves. The results form a portrait of a generation that is savvy about visual culture and acutely aware of how identity can be communicated through photography" (Sylvia Wolf).

Balcus' photographs are obviously transportive in a sense that these are individuals who could easily reside in the Big Apple as they do in the European Union. It is the simultaneous sense of near proximity, remoteness, and familiarity. And it is with this in mind that Trong G. Nguyen - acting as the inaugural curator - has decided to exhibit these photographs on his modest apartment walls to the tune of songs selected from his cd collection, hoping for some make belief bridge between what one experiences, sees, hears, and what free associations of meaning can be formed from such random, subjective, and perhaps even irrelevant discourses.

Trong G. Nguyen is a curator and artist working and living in Brooklyn. (He also swears that Sofia Coppola is his missing aural twin, as the soundtrack from Lost in Translation is ALL his favorite music). chezTGN and Free Association are initiatives that Mr. Nguyen hopes will bring attention to promising young artists and increase dwindling sales of music for the struggling record industry, while bringing visitors to the lovely neighborhood of Red Hook.

Exhibition is free and open to the public. For hours/days and more information, please contact Trong G. Nguyen at 718-797-1645 or email