Tam Van Tran, “Beetle Manifesto XII”, 2006, Sculpted Paper, Chlorophyll, Spirulina, Acrylic, Staples, Aluminum Foil
Tam Van Tran (b. 1966) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Tran received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1990 from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He later attended the Graduate Film and Television Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which he graduated in 1996.
Tran is the recipient of the 2001 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the 2000 Pollock Krasner Fellowship, the 1993 Ucross Artists Residency, and the 1991 Creative Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities.
“In the last ten years, my work has focused on ideas of personal transformation in a dialogue with nature and culture. I use organic vegetable matters such as spirulina, chlorophyll and food materials like cabbage and carrots, which are mixed with acrylic paints to form a biodegradable soup and drafted onto paper as a drawing. In all my work and the 3-dimensional paper ‘beetle manifestos’ series, the circle shapes are printed by bottle caps referencing the negative space of bottles, and punch holes are used as way to create lines and zeros. Staples provide shimmer as well as structural support of the layered paper.
I transform ordinary materials into objects of abstraction that touch on how a painting is put together with lines, mark making, and surface tension. I’m interested in beauty as an abstract experience, free of subject and object, beyond the generalization of language. This is related to how perception is spatially experienced through cause and effect of actions of the body, speech, and mind.” – Tam Van Tran