Bijoy’s GallivARTing

In this talk

In this talk at Lydia Art Salon, Valérie Chaussonnet walks through Dozens piece by piece. The show grew out of her curiosity about twelve: as a French native in America for 40 years, she was puzzled that the US resists the metric system yet still buys eggs, roses, hours and months in dozens - and twelve divides neatly by two, three, four and six, which she finds makes a natural way to hang a series. She tells the stories inside the works: crocheted French pastries, and her explanation of why a baker's dozen is thirteen; steel landscapes of Provence; wood she recovered from the Pride of Baltimore during art school; hake brushes and a teapot she rescued from a Paris dumpster; a feminist welding helmet; a mimolette cheese that, in a story she says is probably not true, the French catapulted at the Dutch; and her feeling that eating crabs connects her to 400,000 years of being human. A life retrospective told through twelve of everything.

In this conversation

Vy Ngo and Sabrina Mooroogen explore how place, memory and colonial history shape identity. Sabrina invites visitors to look closely at an artwork and leave a written question beside it.

Ngo describes returning to Huế with three generations of her family and turning that experience into her work for Contrapuntals. The exhibition's arrangement follows a journey from the Perfume River through bridges, temples and imperial architecture. Layers of currency imagery, tea paper and rice connect the paintings and installation to trade, extraction and the histories carried by everyday materials.

The conversation also follows Ngo's movement between medicine and art, abstraction and representation, and Vietnamese and American identities. She describes this body of work as a moment when different parts of her practice began to feel whole. Audience questions open up a discussion of unfinished spaces, the meanings viewers bring to art, and the personal cost of seeking acceptance. Throughout, Ngo returns to healing, reclaiming identity and making room for oneself before building connections with others.

In the additional audience Q&A, Ngo discusses creativity beyond visual art, including writing, music and dance, as a way of processing experience. A viewer's reading of a silenced face leads to a discussion of the personal and historical meanings we bring to images. Questions about rage and catharsis bring the event back to art's capacity to hold grief, joy and connection.

Summary includes the welcome and follow-up audience Q&A recorded separately from the YouTube video.

In this conversation

Charles Heppner talks about his last year in Brooklyn, about 12 years ago, when he returned to painting. With his painting supplies in storage, he made a daily watercolor exercise: a template of small 35 mm-proportioned cells, three cells a day, no skipped days. He scanned the pages, and the contact sheets came to about 222. He shows a six-volume boxed set of books, LOOK EXTEND TO BE, made from these scans and cropped to squares, structured like a haiku with a fixed limit and a new constraint each time. He also talks about reading James Joyce's Ulysses to his daughter, how that pushed him to stop separating being a photographer from being a painter, and a series of hands from the subway. The video ends as he starts showing how the books are meant to be read. Charles has an upcoming show at Davis Gallery, Enclosures, with Fallon Bartos and John Sager, running Oct 24 to Nov 21, 2026.