Healing Pattern for Pain Body
April 16 - May 22, 2021
St. Louis, MO — Monaco is pleased to present Healing Pattern for Pain Body in The Monaco Project Gallery and features work by Seattle based artists Leah Meridoc Nguyen and Tuan Nguyen, organized by Monaco member Bruce Burton. The exhibition runs through May 22, 2021. Please e-mail info@monacomonaco.us to make an appointment to visit the exhibition.
Pain body,* refers to the energetic connection accessed within our own bodies to collective, intergenerational, and historical trauma that manifests itself physically and behaviorally.
Born in Vietnam and raised in the United States, Tuan Nguyen’s works - pain body (hobo) and pain body (hardened) are a visceral embodiment of the intersection between Nguyen’s experience of displacement and alienation as an immigrant and America’s greater historical traumas of war and violence. An artist, healer, and social worker, Leah Meridoc Nguyen’s decades long collaboration with a spirit team creates intricate patterns for societal and personal healing. In conversation with their artwork for 22 years, this exhibition is the first public opportunity for dialogue between their work.
Meridoc Nguyen’s Pattern for Protection, Surrender, Water, Unconditional Love, and Presence contains energetic patterns that seek to dissolve the calcified shield of pain body (hardened). Redirecting the dualism and colonialism embedded in the nomadic nature of pain body (hobo), Meridoc Nguyen’s Pattern for Travel, Belonging, Home, and Sunlight posits a transcendent position, that everywhere is the center of the universe. Each point is the center. No matter where we are, we are home.
*The term “pain-body” was coined by author Eckart Tolle, to describe an energetic body of our cumulative individual pain and trauma that can control our actions. Presence allows us to recognize what is activating our pain-body and choose how to respond. The pain-body can also be collective, it is the collective pain-body both Nguyens are addressing.
Please e-mail info@monacomonaco.us to make an appointment, we hope to see you soon.
Leah Meridoc Nguyen (she/they) is an artist-healer and fourth generation artist married to an artist, living and working in Seattle, Washington on Coast Salish lands. They received a BFA in Painting from University of Washington and a Masters of Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis, with studies at The Evergreen State College and Yale at Norfolk. She has also studied energy psychology, reiki, and plant spirit medicine. Nguyen began combining these disciplines into their art practice in 2007 to consciously collaborate with spirit—using energy testing to communicate with her soul to guide a year of daily drawings. In 2014 she expanded her practice to include a team of spirit advisors that is particular to the project they are working on. Nguyen’s work is based on patterns and geometries that create energetic templates for celebrating, healing, transformation, and growth of individuals, groups, communities, and Earth. Nguyen’s work has been exhibited nationally in Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.
Tuan Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in Florida, Tuan Nguyen’s artwork moves within and without the spaces of identity and transmutation, invoking play and uncertainty to create space for possibility. He received his MFA in Painting from the University of Washington and has exhibited nationally in Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Seattle, WA; and St. Louis, MO. Nguyen lives and works in Seattle.