Symmetry is key to Nguyen’s presentation in In Minor Keys. This presentation includes four new paintings made for the exhibition, as well as three paintings and several artist books previously exhibited in Nguyen’s A Comedy for Mortals series of shows. The arrangement of these works, their dimensions, and their content are all thinking about the structures of a house of god, world order, systems of faith, and systems within society.  

Formally, the four new paintings begin with the swirl. Swirls and the Fibonacci spiral are a theme in Plato’s Timaeus and all of Tammy’s ongoing work about the Timaeus, and this relates to this sense of systems and symmetry throughout the works. They are a structure that represents the sublime, infinity, truth, and orbits. 

Nguyen’s paintings are lush and rich with wildlife. Luna moths, another recurring element in Nguyen’s paintings, represent the collapse of the micro and macro by being both insects and symbols of planetary cycles. Eagles can be found embedded within the works, referencing notions of divine justice and calling back to Nguyen’s engagement with The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. The flowers in these works, wild roses and star flowers, are symbolic. Wild roses are used in Dante’s Paradiso and in these works to represent the domain of God and the souls of the blessed in the Empyrean, part of the structure of Dante’s Heaven. The star flowers oscillate between a national symbol, the star of nature, and a symbol of the celestial heavens. 

Nguyen became interested in The Divine Comedy because it is a Christian story in which Dante seeks a kind of spiritual clarity by following Virgil, a Pagan, who knows Christ is coming. Nguyen continues to probe at this provocative tension. The four new paintings created for this exhibition all started out with inspiration from the opening scene in The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio, where Dante finds himself on the shores of Mount Purgatory covered in the soot of Hell. In this story, Virgil takes the grass from Mount Purgatory and wipes Dante’s face with it. After Virgil washes Dante’s face, “the humble plant, even such did it instantly spring up again, there whence he had uprooted it” (Purgatorio I.134-136). This regenerative power of reeds in Purgatorio is why the grasses in these paintings are depicted as wheat – wheat gets at the idea of something generative, something that lives on and feeds others. Nguyen has related this moment of Virgil wiping Dante’s face to the story of Jesus’s face being wiped by Mary Magdalene and his impression being left on the cloth, a story Nguyen previously depicted in her presentation of paintings about the Stations of the Cross.  The paintings Ah, me and O, me interpret this relation by telling the story of Dante and Virgil in this moment through the images of Christ and Veronica.