Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip
September 14 - October 28, 2018
Installation View, Logan Center Gallery. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman
Los Angeles-based artist Candice Lin creates sculptural environments that breathe, seep, ferment, and decay. Working with an arsenal of sculptural forms that include finely crafted objects, organisms such as plants, insects, and bacteria, and natural compounds, Lin interrogates the ways in which histories of power and marginality are inscribed into bodies and into the natural world.
The artist’s first solo exhibition in Chicago, A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip presents a fragile sculptural landscape composed of porcelain fragments submerged in liquid porcelain slip. Rotting plant material and other debris soak in the shallow pool, coloring the white liquid and dirtying the ceramic surfaces. Alongside archival documents, organic material, and finely crafted objects, the immersive installation also includes a video projected above the pool. Lin’s installation extends the artist’s ongoing exploration of material and non-human histories alongside the biographies of three historical figures: novelist James Baldwin, botanist and first woman to circumnavigate the globe Jeanne Baret, and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian.
Also on view is a newly commissioned installation that references the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition through a wall-sized illustration of the fairgrounds, scorched by a fire a year after its closing, placed alongside an image of a desiccated sugar cane field, a diagram of the sugar refining process, and the vaporized scent of burnt sugar and plastic.
A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip brings together material artifacts and organic matter with processes of deterioration and contamination in order to speak to the role of human and non-human agents in racialized, gendered, and classist narratives.
Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip is presented by Logan Center Exhibitions and curated by Yesomi Umolu, Exhibitions Curator with Katja Rivera, Assistant Curator and Alyssa Brubaker, Exhibitions Coordinator. This exhibition is made possible by support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Reva and David Logan Foundation, and friends of the Logan Center. Candice Lin: A Hard White Body a Porous Slip is produced in collaboration with Bétonsalon - Centre d'art et de recherche & Villa Vassilieff and Portikus, Frankfurt/Main with contribution from Temporary Gallery, Cologne.
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About Candice Lin
Candice Lin's work engages notions of gender, race, and sexuality, drawing from post/de-colonialism, citizen science, anthropology, and feminist and queer theory. She has presented solo exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt (2017); Bétonsalon, Paris (2017); Gasworks, London (2016); and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles (2016). She has also exhibited widely in recent group exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; New Museum, New York; HANGAR, Lisbon; Sculpture Center, New York; and Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Sao Paulo. A recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), Lin recently completed residencies at Centre les Récollets, Paris (2017) and Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2016). Lin received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004 and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University in 2001. Lin is Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA.