Art Review | Explored and Inherited Memory Banking

Forget what you think you know about  — or should expect from — the cultural species known as “hotel art,” traditionally a close relative of “bank lobby” art. The Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara initiated its on again/off again exhibition series of fine art shows worth seeking out and thinking about in the ocean-adjacent property of the Riviera Beach House (formerly known as Hotel Indigo).

The latest example of this happy arrangement, up through March 23, is the lyrical but thematically loaded exhibition Core Memory, by interdisciplinary artist Hương Ngô. The Hong Kong–born Ngô, presently a visiting lecturer at UCSB, comes equipped with a strong and evolving resume, having shown work at MoMA, MASS MoCA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, as well as in Vietnam and Hong Kong. She has been praised as an important artist dealing with “themes of identity, intersectionality and decolonialization.”

Tellingly, Core Memory, the title of Ngô’s show, refers to a technical term for binary memory storage from before the age of semiconductors. The phrase also lends an implied poetic resonance in artwork linked to the lineage and legacy of her parents and siblings, Southeast Asian refugees who worked on electronics factory assembly lines.

In a sense, the surface quietude of her work at Riviera Beach House works within a gently subversive framework. Despite underlying conceptual, socio-historical, and embedded personal references in this work, the art here treads softly and appeals to the senses on its own innately visual terms. In particular, a series of cyanotypes printed on unstretched fabric conveys a seeping, fluid blue-into-white palette, with an essentially abstract aesthetic rising out of impressions of water’s edge, and by association, the flight of refugees by water.

[Click to zoom] “Core Memory” by Hương Ngô | Photo: Josef Woodard

Larger cyanotype works fit seamlessly into the relaxed beach-evocative décor of the hotel. A duet of smaller cyanotypes suggest radiographic visions of hidden, interior forces or objects/organs, while another small piece envisions a “secret life of tools” perspective on pliers and wire cutters.

Calmly, casually placed mixed media sculptures in a display case in the upstairs lounge steer artistic intentions into a series of circuit board–like constructions, with a lovely delicacy to behold and an underscoring meaning relative to her family’s factory work. Here, skeletal sculptures have been fashioned with meticulously ordered wire, circuitry, and minute electronic parts. This “family” of compact works function both as optical allurements and reflections on the assembly line lives and products of her refugee family.

[Click to zoom] “Core Memory” by Hương Ngô | Photo: Josef Woodard

Downstairs, a set of compact woven pieces combine technology and ancient craft practice, touching on both the “analog” weaving techniques taught her by her mother long ago, and the “core memory” supplies of conductive thread and copper on silk.

In Ngô’s deceptively understated work here, the art-life circuitry is at once cohesive and liquid, logical in a self-generated way and open to interpretation. Such is the slippery business of the artist’s focus on memories, simultaneously tapped, borrowed, and re-channeled.

Hương Ngô: Core Memory is on view at MCASB Satellite at Riviera Beach House through March 23. The gallery within the hotel is located at 121 State St. is open daily to the public from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. For more information click here.