Candice Lin

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Located at the site of psychological conflict, my work
focuses on the blurry and ever changing boundaries
between longing and disturbance: kittens suffocating
in their own fur, conversations with the largest
artery in my left wrist, the throat of a young girl
spinning a delicate web of blood onto the floor. In
this world, a culture of peculiar familiar rituals
flourishes: brothers vie for the combing rights to
their sisters‚ budding pubic hairs, mothers gather
their first born sons‚ excrement for facial creams,
fathers groan and clutch themselves when their
daughters crunch zucchini and ice.

In order to bring the viewer into this world, I
fracture their connection to the physical usual world
by making objects and spaces that implement a worn
appearance or seem to reference the past. This feeling
of past is either evoked through a reminder of
childhood (hallucinations in dark basements) or
through a visual reference to a vague sense of the
past: a blending of Gothic and Baroque, Medieval and
Victorian that escapes the specificities of each
individual history. With this guise, the space created
dislocates memory, shifting the expected history and
cultural myths, replacing them with my own cosmology
and sense of time. Utilizing strategies of potential
secret-telling, the work whispers to the viewer,
enticing them to come closer and deeper. In the
excavating, as the viewer leans in intimately,
squinting to discern the meaning in the cryptic, flea
sized, backwards writing, they suddenly realize the
discovery is not of a foreign and unknown culture, but
a recognition of their own hidden desires, beliefs,
and memories.

These regions of guilty arousal, displaced memory, and
strange relations are the spaces I focus on in my
work. Intertwining the archetypal and the personal
into complex narratives, the confessional takes on a
mythic tone while the fairy tale closes in with odd
familiarity. This intermeshing of personal myths with
cultural ones forms a mimetic and miniature world
which, in a manner similar to Voodoo, needles into the
larger social body, the physical world...infecting,
enriching, and sharing the blood.
This gesture positions the created world as
simultaneously fantastic and hauntingly realistic.