Candice Lin: It Makes the Patient See Pictures

François Ghebaly Gallery is pleased to announce Candice Lin’s third solo exhibition, It Makes the Patient See Pictures. For this exhibition, Lin explores the movement of power through material objects.

The sculptural works in It Makes the Patient See Pictures address power through the subjects of food and sexuality. Sculptural works include dried and carved root vegetables resembling castrated, withered penises; a tarred black pig projecting an animated narrative of genocide from his asshole; a field of corn mutating into a pig-like terror; and recreations of historical objects of culture recreated as silicone dildos.

The exhibition takes its title from the psychoanalytic idea of the “influencing machine” that is symptomatic of paranoid-schizophrenia. Historian James Clifford created a well known model for thinking of how value and power are assigned within art and culture that is sub-captioned, “a machine for making authenticity.” Lin’s works argue for a parallel between the art-culture machine and the paranoid-schizophrenic-influencing machine. Both machines of power exercise themselves through the proliferation and control of hallucinatory images that have been ripped from context, fetishized, and turned inward where they persecute us with our own alienated desires, masquerading as properties of the objects themselves.

Candice Lin has exhibited internationally, a selection of venues include La Maison Populaire, Paris; Galeria Quadrado Azul, Porto; the Ghetto Biennial 2, Port au Prince, Haiti, and the Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Lin’s work will be included in the upcoming MexiCali Biennial in the beginning of 2013. She has been awarded several residencies, grants, and fellowships including the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown 2011-2012, the Frankfurter Kunstverein Deutsche Börse Residency in 2011, the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil, 2011; the Department of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs CEI grant, 2010; and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, 2009. Candice Lin lives and works in Los Angeles, California.