2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Nguyen’s work is concerned with the dark matter—the untranslatable, the ambiguous, the feelings of loss and absence—in between documented accounts of the past. She examines the malleability of collective and personal memory surrounding orientalism, colonialism, the family, and incarceration, through objects which range from explicitly to ambiguously culturally coded. In her work, reflective surfaces, material with shifting opacities, and image manipulation and abstraction reveal the pivoting functions of objects which simultaneously obscure and uncover illegible histories.

Felisa Nguyen is a Canadian artist of Vietnamese descent, living and working in New York City. Her practice is rooted in lived experience as a dispossessed body in the imperial core. She holds a BFA in New Media at Toronto Metropolitan University, and an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons School of Design at The New School.