Blue Hour by Elaine Nguyen

Installation March 28 2025

Intro

Elaine Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American interdisciplinary artist exploring identity, displacement, and the search for home as a perpetual foreigner. She is drawn to the passage of time and light and utilizes ephemeral materials to convey memory and yearning.

Her work expands across painting, cyanotype, sculpture, and time-based media. Through cyanotypes and long exposures, she captures the fluidity and blurriness of memory and through her use of text, both poetic and linguistic, she navigates vulnerability and relearning language.

Blue Hour

Blue hour, the time of day when the sun has just dipped below the horizon but before the night has arrived is a moment of suspension, an in-between.

The interlude of night and day is when the portals come alive. It is a time that encapsulates yearning.

Blue Hour: Let’s fall in love
75” x 90”, Cyanotype on Fabric, Wood, 2022

Blue Hour: Desolate Moons
75” x 90”, Cyanotype on Fabric, Wood, 2022

Blue Hour: Cerulean Mornings
75” x 90”, Cyanotype on Fabric, Wood, 2022

Blue Hour：Keep my light on
75” x 90”, Cyanotype on Fabric, Wood, 2022

Clip from Blue Hour (11seconds from 10 mins long video)

From the Artist

“Blue Hour has been a project in the making for years, one that is about false desires, yearning, exploration of memory, and devotion. It is also a project that remains unfinished.

I lived this years ago, pulled imagery from a time in my life when I was very young, living in San Francisco. Back then, everything felt like the most vivid thing, there were countless discoveries.

Throughout the years I found myself hung up on this time, stuck on some imagery like the light coming in from my old windows or past desires that felt consuming in how unfinished they were. I embarked on making a “portal”, a way to return to this time in my life that felt like a golden hour.

Embarking on Blue Hour allowed me to explore devotion, how badly do you want something and what type of portal can you create (and activate) to get it. My friend sent me a poem he had written about a time we shared when we were teens. I had made a painting back in 2015 thinking of that same moment. Suddenly, a portal between us was open. I leave Blue Hour missing some gates, there's a joy in thinking about the return and lingering around tender memories without ever needing to go anywhere. There’s also a sense of fulfillment in the wonder that comes with when, if ever, the portal will be complete. It’s the first project I’ve had that spanned over 5 years and it’s pleasurable to think it can continue to exist dormant for many more.

Now I live right by an art installation in the park which happens to be named, Portals of the Past, a gate-like structure in nature overlooking the water, one that I never knew existed until I moved last year. I take walks there and I think it’s funny how I’ve ended up back in this city I love but now everything feels just right, I feel perfectly on time instead of longing for more or wondering what’s to come or wishing I made more of what was.

There’s nowhere else I'd rather be in place or in time and no one else I'd rather be. It’s a miraculous kind of thing and I didn’t anticipate discovering it in a place I’ve called home before. Perhaps all those years ago I was early or laying the groundwork for the beautiful things around me now.”

Interpretation

What makes cyanotype unique as a medium? As a photographic process, cyanotype has the ability to preserve an image for a long time, yet what it captures is never sharp or definitive—it often appears as a hazy imprint, like a memory settling into light and shadow. If cyanotype were to be understood as painting, then light would be its pigment, and time would dictate the way the image emerges. Its strokes are blurred, fluid, never fully controlled.

The difference between cyanotype and painting is not just a technical one, but a temporal one. In painting, each stroke is an active accumulation, a deliberate mark-making process. But with cyanotype, the image is formed through waiting. It is not an instantaneous capture like a shutter click; rather, it is a delayed manifestation, a residual imprint left by the interaction of light and material.

Outro

Blue Hours originally refers to the brief period of twilight before sunrise or after sunset, a time of rapid, unstable shifts in light.

There is certainly something romantic about Blue Hours, but that romance isn’t light or delicate. Elaine captures the most uncontrollable moments of time, and the nature of cyanotype itself reinforces this instability.

This romance isn’t about tenderness, but rather a form of honesty — a way of staring directly at an irreversible transformation.

Walking, Yearning, Wandering | 44" x 78" | Photographic print on lustre paper | 2023