Winnie Truong

Winnie Truong is a Toronto-based artist who has staged solo exhibitions at Patel Brown (Toronto), Erin Stump Projects (Toronto), VivianeArt (Calgary), SAW Gallery (Ottawa), Mulherin (New York), and Galleri Benoni (Copenhagen). She has been an artist-in-residence at Doris McCarthy Center in Ontario and Brucebo in Gotland, Sweden. She received grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council for the Arts. Canada’s The Kit found “world-shifting concepts woven into the minute folds and strokes of her ultra-detailed works” and quoted Trouong saying, “This creative work happens on such a small, detailed scale, but I don’t think that makes it less important. Every little bend and fold of the paper makes a very large difference.”

Interview with Winnie Truong

In conversation with Marcus Civin, on May 2, 2023

Marcus Civin: Winnie, I wonder if you would start by describing your evolution as an artist. Your earlier work seems to have something of a different look to it. How did you get to where you are today?

Winnie Truong: From the beginning, for me, it’s always been about drawing. Throughout school, going to Ontario College of Art and Design University, the programs were so centered on painting that I thought I was going to be a painter. In my final year, my thesis year, I was like, “No!” Drawing seemed to be the most natural and expressive way for me to approach the themes I was drawn to early on— about beauty and obsession, and creating characters in the liminal space between the beautiful and the grotesque. That sort of tension carries through to my new work too. For years, I created large-scale colored pencil portraits. They were about 3x4 feet to 4x6 feet, these large-scale, laborious acts of mark-making. I would start working with a first layer of a chalk pastel base, and then with colored pencils, I added line by line. It was a super dense but meditative process. My mind inhabited that process— It brought me a lot of pleasure, and it was about being immersed in mark-making. I was making monumental portraits of these hairy subjects culled from fashion magazines and every stroke of the pencil was equal to a strand of hair, so the gradual compounding of lines created density, all on the thin, fragile substrate of paper. Six years in—2016—I pivoted. I stepped away from that scale and style.

I started doing residencies in 2016 and departed from my usual studio setup where I had all my comforts. Traveling with little packets of paper, I wanted to deviate from the large-scale two-dimensional drawing initially by doing paper sculptures. I went to the Picasso Museum in Paris in 2015. It was incredible to see the breadth of his work in person, and then there was this quiet moment behind glass of these paper cutouts that were interesting to me because they were so simple, and seemed almost disposable yet they articulated so much. I could see how these cardboard maquettes became the studies for public works of art. Picasso had worked out balance, color, and form in dinky cardboard. I knew I wanted to combine that impulse with my intensive drawing style. My original intent was to explore paper sculpture. Instead I ended up creating these figures on paper that laid dimensionally on a surface rather than on their own. I usually begin by cutting out a silhouette. I might scrub dark colors in there with coloured pencils. The rest is layering marks that sit on top of each other. When you see the work in person, it feels very much about line and blended textures that mimic hair and fascia. 

Doing artist residencies introduced many new processes. I was showing quite a bit in Toronto and New York in the early 2010s. After that, I knew I wanted to take some time to re-invigorate my work but instead of going to grad school. I don’t have an MFA. I’ve gone an alternative route, taking the time to learn what I need in order to build the world I want to see in my work. Part of the magic of residencies is working in situ because the works take on the supernatural impressions of places I’ve been. As a starting point, I’ll go for long walks or collect flowers and elements wherever I happen to be.

I had the feeling that I had reached an endpoint with my large scale portrait work after six years. But with this newer work, I’ve been working with cut paper collage and animations for more than six years now, and I don’t feel like I’ve even gotten close to the end. There’s still more. My studio is messy now because I just did a large wall installation at the Varley Art Gallery in Ontario, Meadow II (2003). I installed a floating garden where I pinned three-dimensional cut paper elements to a large gallery wall. When those elements return to the studio, I will re-sort them into bins in my flat file drawers. I get to play the role of botanist and naturalist in the studio as I reorganize my specimen collection. I’ve shown this wall installation over the years; it’s evolved with new “growths” through a “pruning” process where I’ve removed some elements from the installation and they've ended up in different diorama works.

MC: Are these forest scenes? 

WT: In the dioramas, there are suspended moments and characters that I imagine as one step outside our reality. These environments grow from a separate primordial ooze than ours. They exist outside the male gaze and are ultimately feminist speculative science fiction spaces. A lot of the characters I do imagine as hermits. At the core, they’re shedding the built environment and all these assumptions we make, or the baggage, I guess, of the world we live in. It isn’t a particular forest, but about the shedding of a kind of human skin, wiping the slate clean, and looking at new “nature” that emerges from that. More and more, the dioramas are swampy environments, and they zoom in on a single plant.

MC: I notice you sometimes use the word transgressive in describing your work. Where do you locate the transgression?

WT: For me, it’s about creating these creatures and giving them autonomy in their own worlds. I call the creatures Wimmin Creatures. W-I-M-M-I-N. This naming immediately gives the work a particular lens that excludes a patriarchal gaze. And beyond not conforming to anatomy and expectation, transgression comes from existing outside of the confines of what is expected of a woman in society, and outside the natural order of their imaginary environments. To me, the Wimmin Creatures are robust forms in contortions that catch viewers’ attention but don’t gaze back. They’re in these awkward positions, and they don’t give a fuck. Some of them are part human, part plant. Midnight Feelers (2022) is a darkened plant with these wild-looking blossoms and manicured fingers reaching around. The texture looks like fascia, so these muscle-y tendrils go every which way, something menacing but also darkly sensual. My work is about birthing your environment and tending to your growth and autonomy from this origin. 

MC: You present mostly singular figures.

WT: A few have a sister or a partner aspect. Whether it’s singular or multiple forms, the works center around an aspect of interconnection and the imagined dynamics between the figure and her environment. I will say nature itself is a character in many of the works with or without a body present.

MC: In Silver Light of Two Moons (2022), the character is looking out at us, but it feels like she’s busy with what she’s doing, and in a moment will get back to it.

WT: She is going to get back to what she’s doing. For a long time, I was trying to imagine how to capture all of the possible narratives within one composition. My animations come from wanting to extend the static moments contained in the dioramas. With the cut paper process, there is so much play involved. Even the subtle twirl of a cut out finger can change a gesture to affect the whole storytelling. I ended up at an animation studio in Toronto, The Toronto Animated Image Society, thinking about Lotte Reiniger’s [1899-1981] animated silhouettes. She told the stories of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Cinderella, and all these classic tales with just cut paper. My approach to animation builds upon her multiplane setup— to create the layers of an entire environment. I feel like my dioramas and animations work in tandem with each other, and that’s exciting for me.

MC: Working between your animations and dioramas, you can fix images and also explore their various permutations. Can you tell me more specifically about The Trade (2023), your roughly one-minute stop-motion animation?

WT: The Trade was in a projection room in my last show at Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto. It's a perpetual looping stop motion scene with sound and is captured through a classic frame-by-frame stop motion technique, where I realize each moment by taking photographs with a digital camera pointing down at paper elements laid over multiple planes of glass. In the end, elements from the animation, like the hand in the foreground and the backdrop itself, became the fixed elements of other artworks. The hand in the video became a smaller drawing on a white background titled Sanguine (2022). There are so many articulations and possibilities that come from the way I work with the paper elements of the collage process.

The animations also provide opportunities for large-scale immersive artworks and public artworks. In taking a leap with animation, I have been able to show the work on a large scale, which is just a part of continuing to evolve the possibilities of drawing. Taking my practice beyond… It’s no longer the flat images I started with. There are now these dimensional things (like the diorama collages) and multidimensional time based things (the animations).

MC: For Spilled (2022), in addition to a figure, plant life, and maybe a red moon, am I seeing drops of water, tears, or maybe milk?

WT: All those things. I will leave it open for you, but for me, it’s milk. In that scene there’s this back-aching burden of carrying all of that magical, life-giving nourishment around. That’s where I’m coming from for that moment, from my headspace as a mother. You know, that’s the thing about these works. There is a fairy tale element, but I’m using the veil of enchantment to unload universal and personal subtext all at once. I feel like visually I allow the work to begin as these very colorful, seductive images. The figures are strange and robust and they draw you into environments and tell you their stories as you examine them. Lately I’ve been diving into audiobooks while working, and I’m interested in speculative fiction by women authors, such as Margaret Atwood and Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler (1993). In this writing, there is a need to examine what could happen if we take the worst parts of today and let those grow. My work is about women in the world and their ability and the necessity to thrive in these strange and hostile spaces. But more now than ever, the work also touches on the environment. Dreaming of a woman-led future, would we still have the doom and gloom of climate change? It’s a simplified “what if,” but I think my work asks that in some ways.

And, one work feeds into the next. In my studio, the drawn figures and botanical elements move from one place to another. Usually, I’ll have a few panels, and pieces are jumping back and forth. It’s like they’re saying, “This is not the environment for me. I’m more suitable for this.”

Things build in tandem in that way. I’ve been working larger and larger with the dioramas. For the large works now, I’m doing a lot of problem-solving—looking at stage sets, how panels move in and out, how two-dimensional elements can be situated on a stage within a finite depth, so that other elements can move through to suit my narratives. I’ve always been a maximalist. I like to go in and complicate everything. There’s nothing spare about cutting out pieces, drawing on top of them, and the long process of trying to find that moment I’m happy with when assembling a composition. It’s hard to say how long something will take. 

MC: Like hair or a tree, you don’t know exactly how it’s going to grow.

WT: You don’t know how many strands or leaves, or how much is required.

To find out more about Winnie Truong check her out on Instagram or on her website.