When After Comes Before: Phillip Chen and Tomas Vu

Curated by Anchor Graphics

Exhibition Catalog

Opening reception
 January 27th, 5-8 pm
Phillip Chen and Tomas Vu Lecture: 6:30 pm, 623 S. Wabash, Room 109

The prints of Phillip Chen and Tomas Vu collapse time creating an incongruous space where linear knowledge is replaced by a state of simultaneity. Drawing from personal experience, written history, and the imagination their work incorporates long departed traditions, objects and landscapes, along with futuristic totems, positioning all firmly within a contemporary context. The push and pull of yesterday, today, and tomorrow is encompassed in the very materiality of the work, constructed using computer-controlled laser cutters combined with old-school hand printmaking. Their work is a schematic diagram of the past, present and future often taking on a cosmological appearance. With his theory of relativity, Albert Einstein showed that the passage of time is dependent on one’s frame of reference. Phillip Chen and Tomas Vu are creating visual interpretations of the complex mathematical equations that constitute Einstein’s theory, displaying not only the mutability of time and space, but the collapse and rebirth of the physical world we inhabit. This exhibition is curated by Anchor Graphics.