The Current I: Eppur Si Muove

The Propeller Group was formed in 2006 by visual artists Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b.1976, Sai Gon, Vietnam) and Phunam Thuc Ha (b. 1974, Sai Gon, Vietnam). The initial collaborative operated within a fairly amorphous structure until they were joined by Matt Lucero (b. 1976, Upland, California) in 2008. This was a reuniting for Nguyen and Lucero as they had worked together creating collaborative platforms while in their final years of graduate school at CalArts.
The three members have been producing projects under this structure since. The Propeller Group was initiated as a vehicle to traverse the complex borderlands of contradictory states of understanding; exploring convergences between oppositional concepts such as public/private, advertising/politics, history/future, labor/capital, etc. The collective, with an inherent desire to disrupt, began operating under the various guises of an advertising agency, a PR firm, a film production company, an art collective and a boy band.
By “occupying” and “playing” the roles of cultural producers from different fields and vantage points, the collective was able to appropriate strategies from these different methods of production and utilize them in the realms of contemporary art production—undermining both the systems of production and the codes of brand identity. The Propeller Group approaches the idea of “public” as a complex web of narrative creation, distribution systems, and mythology that infiltrate the social fabric of contemporary culture in ways that could only be understood and processed through irony.
The group often pushes its work back into the public sphere, using commodities as a form of public art. The Propeller Group has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2012) and 10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong (2012). Notable group exhibitions include Prospect 3: Notes For Now, New Orleans, LA (2014); SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul Korea (2014); No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2013); The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York, NY (2012); Made in L.A., Los Angeles Biennial, Hammer Museum (2012); and Six Lines of Flight, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012). The collective will be the subject of forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (2015) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2016).

Christopher Myers (b. 1974 American) is an artist and writer who lives in New York. While he is widely acclaimed for his work with literature for young people, he is also an accomplished fine artist who has lectured and exhibited internationally.
He writes, “I’ve been asking the question lately, ‘What does it mean to be an artist whose work is rooted in the experience of global cultural exchange?” More than the simple small-world market-driven exchanges that mark some artists, whose practices are rooted in the anthropological or outsourcing models of cultural exchange, he is interested in the aesthetic bridges that have been built organically across cultures, classes, and geographies, and has been creating work in those in-between spaces for years.
His practice can be divided into two categories, work by his own hands that lives in the syncretic, the hybrid, and the improvised, and collaborations with artisans from around the globe, extending the conversation of cultural movement across continents and artistic milieus.
He has worked with traditional shadow puppet makers in Jogjakarta, silversmiths in Khartoum, conceptual video artists in Vietnam, young musicians in New Orleans, woodcarvers in Accra, weavers in Luxor and many other artists, who he sees as all being part of one large conversation about the movement of culture, and the ways that languages are borrowed globally, traded from South to South, in order to address the specific local concerns of people that have been thrust into contexts that range far beyond their locality.

Jamie Y. Shi is a scholar, writer, and independent curator currently living and working in Los Angeles, CA. A graduate of Columbia University, Shi holds an MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies and a dual Bachelor’s Degree in Art History and Biology from UC Berkeley.
Shi’s research interests include the history of science, historiography, and the representation of time across disciplines in the sciences and humanities. In 2014 Shi served as Special Projects Coordinator at The Mistake Room where she helped launch the organization’s publishing arm, MISPRINT as well as organize projects with Korakrit Arunanondchai, Vivian Suter, and Matsumi Kanemitsu.