About the Artist
Tam Van Tran (b. 1966) immigrated to America with his sister right before the fall of South Vietnam, and grew up in Denver. Receiving his BFA from the Pratt Institute in New York City, and attending the Graduate Film and Television Program at the University of California, Los Angela, Van Tran is an artist that is continually stretching, literally and figuratively, the boundaries of his work. Utilizing unconventional materials, such as chlorophyll and spirulina, Van Tran explores the universe, and is “intensely interested in the transitory nature of all materials. My paintings became a site or location for trying to capture the invisible without my having to make my hand visible.” Van Tran’s work is shown across the country at The Art Museum of the University of Houston, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among many others.
Invited to work at ULAE by Bill and Larissa Goldston, Tam Van Tran continued his exploration of abstraction and emotion, the interior and exterior, the man-made and the organic in lithography. In Holographic Ensemble Bill and Van Tran photographed Cool Whip under tungsten lights, following Van Tran’s desire to make mountains of whipped cream. The resulting 2007 print is an amalgamation of remembered and imagined worlds.