Seeking Comfort in Confinement is a project I started during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Being away from my friends and family, I felt lonely and began to slip back into my old habits of playing make-believe and living in my own head again. I started looking at objects within the house, gave them personalities, and looked at them as my companions in isolation. The photos in this series depict me in communion with those objects, capturing moments of self-soothing in difficult times.
Two works from the project, A Guardian Angel (2020) and The Expulsion (2020), received the Juror's Award for The Big Show 2021 at Lawndale Art Center, Houston, Texas.
"Victoria Nguyen submitted photos from her Seeking Comfort in Confinement series, its title, naturally, a reference to the difficult pandemic-influenced year in which the photos were shot. Each is quite small: roughly 8" x 6", so the trio can get swamped among the hundreds of other pieces. But they also possess an undeniable pull and a quiet but devastating energy. Nguyen frames herself as almost faceless, her hair providing a mask.
The photographs are fairly spartan as far as details go: the photographer, a mostly empty room and often a single object with which she interacts. A sense of solitude drifts from the images like a ghost. Nguyen appears to invite the viewer into these strange isolated moments of communion with a doll or a lamp. On one hand, the spareness of the images feels almost uncomfortably remote. On the other, by sharing her own discomforts, Nguyen finds a way to translate an undesirable state of being into something relatable, a moment of connection."
- Andrew Dansby / Houston Chronicle
