Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip

Logan Center Exhibitions is pleased to present Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip. For her first solo exhibition in Chicago, Lin displays 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 her 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. Each of these protagonists negotiated complex power relations vis-à-vis normative constructions of race, gender and sexuality throughout their lifetime. Lin’s installation speaks to their diverging and intersecting biographies as well as the instrumentalization of non-human agents in racialized, gendered and classist narratives.

Also on view is a newly commissioned installation that references the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a part of which was staged on the Midway Plaisance adjacent to the Logan Center. A wall-sized illustration of the fairgrounds, scorched by a fire a year after its closing, is 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. Referencing the preoccupation with sewage management during the Exposition, a low-fi circulatory system boils and distills urine—collected from the artist and the Logan Center’s staff—and moves it into the main exhibition space where it mingles with the milky pool of liquified porcelain. 

An accompanying publication is planned for a 2019 release, featuring essays by curator and writer Lotte Arndt and scholar Rizvana Bradley alongside a conversation between the artist Candice Lin and scholar C. Riley Snorton, and a conversation between scholars Mel Y. Chen and Jih-Fei Cheng. These contributions will be supplemented by Lin's visual essay that will feature archival images and texts relating to the research consulted and referenced in A Hard White Body.

Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip brings together material artifacts and organic matter with processes of deterioration and contamination in order to visualize the histories of power and marginality that are inscribed into bodies and into the natural world.

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.

Related Programming

Opening Reception and Artist's Tour
Tuesday, September 25, 6–8pm, Logan Center Gallery

Join us for a reception to celebrate the opening of A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip. Lin will give an artist’s tour of the exhibition at 6:30pm.

In Conversation: A Hard White Body
Thursday, October 11, 6pm, Logan Center Terrace Seminar Room

Join us for a conversation on Candice Lin’s project A Hard White Body and her exhibition at the Logan Center with Lotte Arndt, curator and writer, Rizvana Bradley, Assistant Professor of Film Studies and African American Studies at Yale University, and C. Riley Snorton, Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of Chicago. 

Gallery Talk with Nance Klehm
Thursday, October 18, 6pm, Logan Center Gallery

Artist and social ecologist Nance Klehm will give a gallery talk centered on processes of distillation and waste management.

All events are free and open to the public.

About the artist
Candice Lin’s work engages notions of gender, race, and sexuality, drawing from post/de-colonialism, citizen science, anthropology, and feminist and queer theory. She has presented solo exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt (2018); Bétonsalon, Paris (2017); Gasworks, London (2016); and Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles (2016). She has also exhibited widely in recent group exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm; New Museum, New York; HANGAR, Lisbon; Sculpture Center, New York; and Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Sao Paulo. A recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), Lin recently completed residencies at Davidoff Art Initiative, Dominican Republic (2018), Centre les Récollets, Paris (2017) and Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2016). Lin received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004 and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University in 2001. Lin is Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA.

Logan Center Exhibitions
Logan Center Exhibitions presents international contemporary art programming at the Logan Center Gallery and throughout the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Reflecting the spirit of inquiry at the university, Logan Center Exhibitions focuses on open, collaborative, and process-based approaches to cultural production.