Claremont, Calif. (January 10, 2020)—Pitzer College Art Galleries presents Natural History: A Half-Eaten Portrait, an Unrecognizable Landscape, a Still, Still Life, an exhibition of new ceramic sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Candice Lin.
Organized
by Ciara Ennis, the Galleries’ director and curator, Natural History: A
Half-Eaten Portrait, an Unrecognizable Landscape, a Still, Still Life will
comprise a full-scale ceramic representation of the artist reclining with her
future cat. Lin’s monumental ceramic sculpture references the history of clay
sarcophagi, specifically the Etruscan terracotta funerary sculptures from the 9th
through 2nd centuries BCE, famously life-sized and often featuring a man and a
woman reclining together. Renowned for their naturalistic representations of
the human form, Etruscans practiced the tradition of interring the body, with
animal companions or objects that held particular significance to the deceased,
within a sarcophagus. Lin imagines housing her own decomposing body and that of
the cat that she lives with at the time of her death within this sculptural memento
mori. In addition to exploring ideas around mortality and interment, Lin’s
installation considers existence and futurity from a post-human perspective by
linking the longevity of clay—the life-span of fired ceramics can be thousands
of years—with other organic life-cycles. Like historical sarcophagi, where the
outstretched limbs of the figures would have once held vessels containing foods
or precious objects, Lin’s sculpture will portray her and her cat accompanied
by vessels containing preserved plants, seeds and minerals.
Complementing
the life-size sarcophagus, are a series of illuminated glass aquariums, set
onto metal stands. Mimicking museological display cases, these vitrines house
colonies of Dermestid “flesh-eating” beetles, which will consume a
series of works resembling human bones. These objects have been fabricated from
a commercial meat-paste substitute combined with Lin’s own dried skin and
fingernails. Used in museums for cleaning bones and carcasses for display and
research, these carnivorous insects have been employed by Lin to suggest an
effective interspecies collaboration—a subject that underpins much of Lin’s
practice. By cultivating this family of beetles, which over generations will
learn to survive and thrive on this diet, Lin creates a sub-population
predisposed to thrive while her own body decays. Requiring constant caretaking,
and the harvesting of her own skin, these beetles serve as active reminders of
our mortality.
The
materials used by Lin are part of her ongoing research into the histories of
colonial trade objects such as porcelain, silk, opium, abortifacient plants,
poisons and cochineal in relation to discourses around whiteness, exoticism,
race and othering. While earlier works focused on the acquisition and
exploitation of non-Western botanical and biological processes, this exhibition
examines the institutional framing by museums of historical artefacts and
organic material—be they sarcophagi or body parts—through their collection and
display technologies and by doing so reveals how these systems configure
knowledge.
The exhibition will run from January
25 – March 26, 2020. Lin’s ceramic sculptural work for this exhibition
will be fabricated in the Pitzer College ceramic studio in connection with her
semester-long artist residency at Pitzer.
Candice Lin has exhibited nationally and internationally and
was included in Made in L.A. 2018. Other recent exhibitions of
her work in Los Angeles include The
inscrutable speech of objects (Occidental College, 2019) and Meaningless Squiggles (Francois Ghebaly, 2019).
Exhibition Catalogue
In keeping with the exhibition’s references to museological
procedures—collection, display and conservation—the publication will take the
form of a traditional natural history museum guide. Deploying conventional
museal language and formats for organizing the display and interpretation of
information, this publication will call attention to how museums use didactic
devices—be they wall texts or gallery guides—to produce knowledge as well as
specific narratives that bolster an institution’s ideological position.
The catalogue will include an essay by Dr. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, associate professor of English
and Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College, who will explore the use of
fermentation and rot in Lin’s practice in relation to nativism, nationalism and
race privilege. An essay by Dr. Ciara Ennis, director of Pitzer College Art
Galleries, will question the presumed neutrality of museums and examine the use
of museal display technologies—vitrines, didactics and audio-visual
mechanisms—to construct specific bodies of knowledge that support the
structural biases embedded in traditional museum histories.
