(L.A. in S.F.) Candice Lin at Friends Indeed
In Department of Art assistant professor Candice Lin's recent exhibition at Friends Indeed, seven intimate pieces depict her cat Roger, painted at home with leftover oil paint. They were never inteded to be seen by the public.
Candice Lin, Bedroom Licks (2020). Oil pastel, oil, and encaustic on linen, 14 × 18 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Friends Indeed. "Roger and friends, Candice Lin’s recent exhibition at Friends Indeed, included seven oil paintings depicting her eponymous cat Roger that were never intended to be seen by the public. However, just as the exchange between the private and public has become increasingly muddled under the parameters of a smothering, pandemic-imposed domestic life, so, too, has an artist’s relationship to the work she makes privately, and what she offers for public viewing. As far as quarantine-specific pastimes go, Lin took up the appeasing act of painting her cat, each portrait painted at home with leftover oil paint from more “serious” paintings.
For Lin, these intimate paintings mark a significant departure—not in subject matter (as cats have featured frequently), nor in their representational nature, but rather, in medium and materiality, as well as in interiority. Until recently, Lin’s practice—nebulous, rigorous-in-research, and strategically diverse—has not publicly included a medium as canonically Eurocentric as a stretched oil painting on canvas. Likewise, her body of work has seldom included such an intimate, even autobiographical, glimpse into her interior life. Much of Lin’s previous endeavors have delved into destabilizing legacies of colonialism, slavery, and migration, often focusing specifically on colonial flora (such as fungi).
In light of Lin’s research-based and outward-looking praxis, this shift towards interiority is a new lens for the artist. When I reached out to Lin to fact check some of my assumptions about the work, she told me that the paintings were a pleasurable activity, made under the veiled belief that they would not be seen. As such, they are objects plucked from Lin’s private (interior) world. The pieces are distinctly modernist in their depiction of interiors: chunky impasto application, crosshatched wallpaper, a plethora of bedspreads. Yet unlike the modernists, for whom the domestic interior became a pivotal repeated signifier of modern urbanity, Lin depicts her cat not as a sidekick to another eroticized protagonist (e.g., Balthus), nor as a decorative wallflower of interior life (e.g., Vuillard), nor as a stand-in for the entrapped woman (e.g., A Room of One’s Own). Instead, Lin’s cat is a cat—the protagonist of his own contemporary quarantine melodrama."— Stephanie Mei Huang, Mar. 31, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Contemporary Art Review LA website.
Read more about Candice Lin.
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