An Artist’s Multi-Species Mythology, Inspired by Her Cat

CAMBRIDGE, MA — Conceived throughout months of close companionship with her cat, Roger, Candice Lin’s Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping at the Carpenter Heart for the Visual Arts enacts a procedure of other-environment-making whereby multi-species relations — earthbound and chthonic, human and nonhuman — are vital to our ongoing survival. Established in a realm where humans are no for a longer time sovereign, Lin foregrounds the life and fatalities of felines, critters, microbes, and demons in a apply of producing kin. 

Around the gallery entrance, an animated video greets site visitors, transporting them to the debris of a submit-apocalyptic desert landscape. An open up-structured canopy tent erupts out of earthen rubble, its foundation adorned with 3D-scanned ceramic palimpsests of Tang dynasty zhenmushou — amorphous multi-species tomb guardians. Inside of, a cat demon commences the sluggish therapeutic apply of qigong. As the feline lifts its paws earlier mentioned its ears and collapses into its knees, viral gifs of personified animals and spambot messages flare onscreen, inciting me to boost my self-cultivation by way of paid subscriptions and bundle discounts. 

The exhibition’s central set up, for which the exhibit is titled, is an elaborate modular recreation of the animation’s digital cover and its hybrid demon companions. Undulating sheets of indigo-dyed textiles recount authentic and invented multi-species tales by way of laboriously hand-drawn and stenciled pictures made  utilizing glutinous rice paste, a Japanese resist-dye system. A lady is digested by burrowing worms and noticed frogs a few-headed canines snarl and snap and mischievous felines dance with very long-tongued demons. 

The indigo plant, the exhibition’s central product, is embedded with its have multi-species narrative. Fermented by Lin in vats of broth, moldy fruit, and the artist’s urine, distinctions amongst human and nonhuman are collapsed as the plant digests microbes of human excessive in get to deliver indigo’s distinctive vivid hue.

Beneath the lush material of this blue refuge, surrounded by multi-confronted and multi-limbed tomb guardians, ceramic cat pillows lie on the carpeted flooring. An animated feline by the identify of White-n-Gray, based mostly on a feral cat that lived on the artist’s porch, ruminates on its mortality from a little Television set in the tent. As I lie on the comfortable, stippled rugs, my ear turns cold from resting on a single of the ceramic cats. This emphasis on tactility continues in “A Journal of the Plague Calendar year (Cat Demon Diary)” (2021), a browsable individual archive of the year’s collective terrors and Lin’s anxieties, hopes, and content procedures. 

Two sculptures composed of textured surfaces on desk-like bases sit just outdoors the principal area. “Tactile Theater #1 (Right after Noguchi)” and “Tactile Theater #2 (Following Švankmajer)” (both equally 2021) are very best knowledgeable with yet another human being. As Lin states in a video clip on the gallery’s website, viewers are meant to keep each other’s gaze as they sweep their arms throughout the dips and curves of the surfaces, which reveal by themselves to be a mélange of ribs, ears, and nostrils. Right here, the discovery of these obscured human body pieces can only be reached by the softening of our personal corporeal boundaries as palms crash into, loop all around, and overlap each and every other.

When the porous partnership involving individuals and nonhumans spurs fears of contagion, Lin gives an alternate interpretation of multi-species proximity as we progress towards the dire ecological consequences of capitalist development and human exceptionalism. Rather than constructing limitations and imposing borders, Lin considers a kind of multi-species properly-remaining rooted in the myriad approaches human and nonhuman cohabitation occurs in this messy, entangled affair called everyday living.

Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping continues at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University, 24 Quincy Road, Cambridge, Massachusetts) as a result of April 10. The exhibition was curated by Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Loved ones Director, the Carpenter Center for the Visible Arts, Harvard College and Victoria Sung, Associate Curator of Visible Arts, Walker Artwork Centre.