I thank Minneapolis-based multidisciplinary artist Mel Nguyen not only for her incredibly wacky and engaging portfolio, but for teaching me how to correctly pronounce her last name (“win”, unlike I, who thought the ‘N’ and ‘G’ were not silent #lose).

Nguyen’s winning work (okay I’ll stop now) swims between ambitious graphic design to experimental sculptural installations that stretch, float and cut across digital and often colorful tangible surfaces. She segues between glitchy animations - check out her experimental website “New Paintings”, which cleverly references the nuances of low-res Photoshop animations in a malfunctioning looped web-browser - to wearable statements. If you’re interested in ball bearings, metal and neon plastic tubing, then her “Bolted” necklaces are for you, available at her website.

“Instead of declaring that my process has changed, I will say that the more I make, the more ‘finished’ experiments I have collected that will contribute to new ones. I see it as a series of connected trials. I am new, learning, and just getting started.”

I really enjoy Nguyen’s “Love Poems”, a project formed from an online translator - text was fed back and forth between English and Japanese until it no longer made any changes. The translator became a system of degenerating thoughts, revealing new meaning in the original text. The poems reference human conditions and become a romantic, prosthetic diary, and are really engaging when viewed together.

Check out Mel Nguyen’s incredible body of work via her website, you won’t be disappointed.