CANDACE LIN

Los Angeles–based artist Candice Lin (b. 1979) investigates the legacies of colonialism, racism, and sexism by mapping the trade routes and histories of a range of colonial goods. She often annexes such hysterical phrases from historical accounts of colonial commodities like cochineal, tobacco, and indigo. For Lin, these mouthy fragments divulge the larger ascriptive classifications—race, gender, and the human itself—by which violence and power are asymmetrically meted. The artist detonates categories and sculpts from the shrapnel.

On view in the exhibition is Minoritarian Medicine, 2019, a work that feels like a cabinet of curiosities that includes ceramics, glass jars, herbal tinctures, and glazed ceramic plates with surreal drawings in blue that approximate decorative porcelain dishes. What is this surreal medicine chest of the minority, an alternative apothecary that Lin proposes?  Lin provides us with objects that are recognizable, but their significance and symbolism has been reoriented or envisioned anew towards an embrace of new knowledge or ways of knowing our histories.

Her mixed-media installations evolve from extensive research that disinter stories buried in various archives/ Lin is a DIY ethnographer, a maverick scholar who communicates aesthetically, not in meticulously footnoted essays in esoteric journals but in ambitious installations that welcome contradictions and are wide open to diverse interpretations. She often includes materials like indigo, cochineal and ceramic to address the legacies of colonization, the histories and fictions that are contained within these materials. Her works often speaks to historical and contemporary crises of migration, human trafficking and labor conditions.

Candice Lin (b. 1979) is from Concord, Massachusetts and works in Altadena, California. She received her BA in both visual arts and semiotics from Brown University, in 2001, and MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, in 2004. Her work has been exhibited at Portikus, Frankfurt (2018); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017); Bétonsalon—Center for Art and Research, Paris (2017); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2017); New Museum, New York (2017); SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); and Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2013), among others. She is the recipient of several residencies, grants, and fellowships, including a California Community Foundation Award (2014), Fine Arts Work Center Residency (2012), Frankfurter Kunstverein Deutsche Börse Residency (2010), and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009).