Grounding Force

"I've been trying to make my work less about me," Vivian Tran, BFA + BS '25, said from her SMFA studio, gesturing towards a sculpture in progress of an empty doll-sized bed.
"The bed says what I'm trying to get across just as well as if I put a body inside it."
By removing the sleeper, she is giving viewers the space to tuck themselves into the sculpture's story instead.
As a sophomore, Tran completed a series of intimate large-scale canvases that served not only as windows for her viewers into her family's domestic life in Canada but also provided her with a way to deeply connect with her own parents for the first time.
Though she grew up in close quarters with 12 family members, Tran struggled to bridge the language barrier with her parents, Vietnamese immigrants who are the children of Chinese immigrants.
Viewing portraits of themselves lying in bed cocooned in white sheets or slouching in a threshold after a workday that began at 4 am, they began seeing each other in new ways.
"Art is sustenance. Art is lifeblood, and it can change lives," Tran said with a catch in her voice. It changed hers.
A first-generation college student, she came to SMFA without first setting foot on campus. Yet, she felt a sense of belonging immediately.
"I still can't believe it, but Carrie Salazar (a research librarian) at the library, who didn't even know me, came and picked me up from the Boston airport and brought me to my dorm in the middle of the pandemic," Tran said.
The W. Van Alan Clark, Jr. Library at SMFA quickly became her "grounding force," where she conducted research for every one of her studio projects and found community with staff members like Salazar, Darin Murphy, and other students.
Tran's painting professor, Angelina Gualdoni, nominated her for a Yale-Norfolk residency, which she received in the summer of 2023. The FIRST Resource Center and the Tufts Career Center helped her piece together funding.
In Connecticut, Tran put down her paintbrushes and applied a painterly perspective to film instead, splicing together retro documentary footage of birds soaring from one screen into the next for her final exhibition.
"Projection, at its most basic form, is just light. I was realizing the emotional effect of light and how it feels in empty space," she explained.
That summer, her practice lifted off the ground, too.
"It was an incredibly rigorous experience, and I grew tremendously from the faculty feedback but also being part of the most incredible community I could imagine," Tran said.
Tran spent last summer in Michigan as a Fellow and Resident at the Ox-Bow School of Art's prestigious Summer Residency program affiliated with the Art Institute of Chicago. The Tufts Career Center supports SMFA’s institutional partnership with Ox-Bow, offering a bi-yearly summer fellowship and an annually funded workshop to SMFA recipients.
Ox-Bow gave Tran a dedicated studio with a fully funded three-month residency in exchange for working part-time for the arts non-profit.
Driving to nearby Lake Michigan to watch a sunset or combing through local thrift stores became ways to introduce new influences into her practice. In a group exhibition, Tran created an untitled installation involving a Chinese doll in traditional Hanfu dress that she’d thrifted in town peering mysteriously from an HVAC vent.
"In making this piece I was thinking about what it means to be seen and the invisible work of people who make up the foundations of our everyday lives,” she said.
Back on campus for her final year, Tran is leaning into Minimalism by taking a class titled "Nothingness" an elective for her combined degree in Cognitive Science. Philosophy Professor Stephen White and Professor of International and Literary Studies Charles Inouye co-taught the course. The course directly connects to her work in the studio.
"We've been learning how objects have lives and souls, and to be in solidarity with objects is also to be in solidarity with the world," Tran explained.
The night before our studio visit, she'd stayed up late making a new sculpture as part of Lauren O'Connor-Korb's Introduction to Sculpture Foundations: a cardboard box with a window cut into the side depicting an empty room. Tran laid a miniature hardwood floor and set a resin office chair in the corner. The chair spun in hypnotic circles without a worker and a desk to ground it.
It's creating these lyrical moments that defines Tran's practice so clearly as she prepares to break into the art world after graduation.
"I’m always going to approach art-making with personal stakes, but all of these questions that I have about life can’t be answered by one discipline or medium,” she said.
Lead image: Alonso Nichols/Tufts University