Industry of Memory

In this four part series, I use a horror or a Silent Hill ethos to address trans-generational trauma and critique American images of Vietnamese women during the war in Vietnam. Originally, the coloured pencil drawings I incorporated into this series were a part of another series where I drew from war films and found footage and tried to impose a more critical gaze. What I discovered is that these reference images resisted critique because of how gaze-y they were.
 
In Viet Thanh Nguyen's book Nothing Ever Dies, he talks about how when we portray war we necessarily forget the people on other side in order to coherently characterize and narrativize the past. In Silent Hill trauma functions in a similar way, characters have to forget things about the past in order to maintain a stable understanding of their selves. It's for this reason that I was attracted to psychological horror when remixing these images. Horror forces us to confront how our identity (national or individual) is predicated on forgetting—forgetting our trauma and how we have traumatized others.

~ Isabelle Nguyen

Isabelle Nguyen is a Montreal based comic book writer and illustrator from Calgary, Alberta. She graduated from Concordia University with a BFA in Studio Arts and Art History in 2017. Her comics have been published in print and on the web by the Fine Arts Reading Room, carte-blanche and Tabulit. Currently, she is throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.