Ghost Ghost Teeth

Bio
Simon Tran aka Ghost Ghost Teeth is an artist and educator that focuses on painting, drawing, and installation.  He was born in Long Beach, CA and just moved to San Jose.  He received a BA in Art Practice from U.C. Berkeley.  He taught with Southern Exposure’s Mission Voices youth arts program and was a teaching artist at Richmond Art Center. Tran has shown with multiple galleries in Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Seattle, Portland, Tuscaloosa, and Denver.  He has also exhibited at NIAD, Berkeley Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, and Berkeley Art Museum.  His work is in the Capital One Collection. He has done a handful of murals with Dragon School 99.

Statement
My work is about reconfiguration, resistance, and a hearty bowl of soup. There are sensibilities in my work stemming from post-punk, Vietnamese- American culture, The Vietnam War, retro video games, my daughter’s beautiful imagination, and my dad’s flea market finds.  I make reference to the human body through painting and wood cut outs of organic shapes. A swaddled child or a contorted figure may inhabit  the compositional landscape along with patterns that stop, start, and overlap. Color is a strong influence on my work.  I combine nostalgic colors that reshapes memories.  There is no resolve in the narration of my work, instead there are slow meditative builds that lead to chunky riffs that wormhole into hard-edged noise, all loopy-loopy and stuff.