Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen’s “Space Fiction & the Archives” plays on unstable symmetries, provocatively casting the viewer in the role of the titular conjunction. The exhibition looks back to 1967 and connects a monument (the state-sanctioned extraterrestrial landing pad built in St. Paul, Alberta, in celebration of Canada’s centennial) with a document (the text of Canada’s then new point-based immigration policy). Science fiction and multiculturalism are the twin engines of Canada’s new place in the world—or, rather, the universe.

The first gallery is a silent and bright time capsule. Sourced from national archives, small-town newspapers, family albums, tourist shops, and eBay, works occupy walls, shelves, a small vitrine, and the floor. Their treatment, scale, and position play a crucial role in the viewer’s archival adventure. In Immigration Policy (point-based system) (all works cited, 2012), the official policy text is enlarged and engraved across six black Plexiglas panels, recalling tombstones. Viewing this work means literally seeing oneself (and others) reflected. Across the room, the matte enlargement of an aerial photograph of St. Paul lies slightly elevated from the floor. As the viewer tries to locate the landing pad, she has to peer down and walk around the image. In the process, she enacts the alien’s descent to earth. The viewer’s journey across the gallery alters the images’ truth-value: Their evidentiary quotient gives way to puzzlement, disbelief, discomfort, amusement, and irreverence.

A sliding door grants access to the second room, where the nineteen-minute film 1967: A People Kind of Place remixes these documents and inserts them in a broader, fictionalized audiovisual archive. The film is structured as an alien’s journey to earth where, while officially welcomed, she may not fit on the landing pad. Footage from news agencies, home cinema, and interviews mix with quotes from Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller to reveal that while Canada fantasized about opening itself up to intergalactic settlement, it still favored white European immigrants. Meanwhile, Aboriginals were still absent from the picture. The film ends when a white-gloved hand carefully closes a folder: It is ominously stamped “dormant.” Nguyen’s archival activism asserts the potential of these sleeper cells.