Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip

September 14—October 28, 2018

Opening Reception and Artist Tour: Tuesday, September 25, 6-8pm | Logan Center Gallery (915 E 60 St)

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.