THERE exhibition catalogue essay

By David Schutter (April 2007)

If the contemporary desire for clarity is motivated by a basic desire to court the entry of meaning into our world, then one thing is certain: to achieve anything towards those means there must be an exodus of the refuse one accumulates simply by being in the world. With the work of Carey Lin, it isn’t a matter of scrutinizing these jettisoned materials, but instead of looking to how this quotidian junk can be translated into ephemera and artistic practice as it is discarded. For Lin, a consideration of what is cast out leads towards an understanding of our past experience and the abject is something that holds the potential for a purposeful and directed activity. With refuse as Lin’s starting point, the doubtful questions of What to make?, How to start?, When to know to leave things alone? are mostly disabled by working with humble and transient matter(s). Transformation is not heroic in the slightest. In her text-based works, where she takes outgoing email subject lines and prints them according to variously limited systems on bound, translucent vellum sheets, she moves the mundane into the tableau of both concrete and metaphysical poetry. This is done with a suspicion of the linguistic tropes and most readable expressions therein. Nonetheless, it is an oblique way (since she is not singularly crafting the text, but only placing it on the page) for Lin to communicate with alternately romantic impulses and the awkwardness of bare self-awareness. Using collaborative subject lines that friends, institutions, and random mailers have helped shape as her syntax, Lin reveals the notion that we are sometimes what others define us as, and not necessarily ourselves. That alterity of self and other, the distant source material bending toward poetics and draftsmanship, is what makes her coolly bound books resonate with a dialectical beauty.

But the clearest examples of the above strategies are in Lin’s paintings. They measure in formats of 27”x 24”, the dimensions of the trash bag she uses domestically, and 21” x 24”, the panels that remain after cutting the former from plywood sheets. Primed stark white, and leaned against her studio walls, these panels catch months of metaphorical garbage. Lin documents her outgoing trash through snapshot photographs. From these she takes the liberty to make her paintings. Each one depicts a blob-like, vaguely anthropomorphized heap of contained stuff. Placed like a portrait, albeit abruptly, on the white painting ground (and the actual physical ground of display) are highly nuanced, abstract painting vocabularies bound within the strange perimeter of a bag-form. These sit on the surface with great vulnerability and clumsiness, but speak in a language so influenced by 20th-century expressionistic painting that they are both a stunning display of technique while being a grand effacement gesture. “This is the way lovers speak?” the paintings beg to ask, but Lin’s parried responses function inside an aware and melancholic bubble. Contrary to the pessimism they confront, the paintings affirm that from the bottom, things can only go up.

David Schutter is a painter and Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.