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above: Zarina, Map of Delhi (2000)

Brooklyn, New York. Her body of work utilizes the found object as a basis for sculpture, site-specific installation and public art projects. Shin writes, "I accumulate massive quantities of commonly discarded objects and transform them into new forms that refer to the presence and absence of the body. I am attracted to certain found materials - like the excess fabric from altered pants, a single sock left behind in a laundromat, or stockings scarred with runs - because they embody a certain history of dysfunction, rejection, and abandonment."

In her fabric-based sculpture and installation, Shin located individual and collective histories in abstract configurations that blur distinctions between object and material. Seams, for example, reduces various items of everyday clothing to mere suggestions of their original form. "In this series of sculptures, I have taken a shirt or a dress and cut away all the fabric until only the seams remain - turning clothing into a complex linear structure." Everyday, familiar objects are transformed into abstract architectural expressions; in Alterations, similarly, blue jeans and dress shirts are deconstructed and displayed to the viewer as a collection of fragments and seams. The process of physically paring down each item of clothing itself echoes Shin's larger project of dissecting experience to expose what remains at its core when the human figure, gesture, and voice are subtracted from the equation. As such, the work gestures to the temporal breach in representing experiences that do not remain intact over the passage of time.

THE ACCUMULATION OF EXPERIENCE

Zarina's Displaced Home/Displaced People, originally created for Icons of the Millennium, an exhibition held in Mumbai, India, presents a set of fifty nearly identical sculptural "homes," fashioned out of stacks of printed paper and lining to one another by a thin rope. Zarina explained the process: "I cut up my old prints drilled a hole through them, and tied it all together. The string connecting them functions as an umbilical cord of sorts, taking us back to where we just came from." The meditative repetition of paper structures in Displaced Home/Displaced People compels the viewer to abandon notions of home as a specific physical site. Spread out loosely in a configuration that meanders across the floor, the work's shape and structure suggests that its meaning is not primarily derived from the specificity of its material construct, but rather from an interconnected series of lived experiences. In this piece, Zarina abandons the possibility of communicating the singularity of each home in favor of suggesting the anonymity of home as a psychic structure across time and space.

This process of cataloging and accumulation is similarly important to Jean Shin. The anonymity of the found object figures centrally in her work, conveying multiple layers of history and experience that create a subject's sense of belonging within a community. In Worn Soles, an installation recently on view at the Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, the artist arranged hundred of shoes, ripped apart and displayed in their most essential, naked form. The soles create a sculptural formation that suggests multiple patterns of community, migration, and labor. "I have deconstructed 200 pairs of old shoes in order to create a massive arrangement of soles and heels that suggest a crowd gathering. While the footprints indicate movement throughout the installation, the layers of scratches and mars on the worn surfaces of the individual soles reveal their past." The soles act as a clue to the complex and often compromised histories of their owners - each sole bears marks of its owner's past life, struggles, or comforts. While the sense of absence created by the soles leads the viewer to imagine the people and lives they once belonged to, Shin further disembodies the idea of lived experience through the act of physically taking apart the shoes to expose their own construction. In speaking about this work, Shin notes the connections between the objects in her installation and the practice of removing ones shoes before crossing the threshold of home as integral to her own experiences of community gatherings. Shin's formation orchestrates a collective crossing of thresholds between inside and outside, belonging and alienation.

ON THE EDGE OF COLLAPSE

Shin's installation Chance City, made through the laborious construction of thousands of 'Instant Scratch and Win' lottery tickets, explores the immigrant experience in relation to the brittleness of home and the "American dream." "Like a house of cards that is perfectly balanced yet ready to collapse, the lotto tickets are used as building blocks to create monumental structures. In this massive installation, thousands of discarded lottery cards are transformed into an elaborate city that explored the fragility between dreams and reality." Once again, the artist's fascination with a particular object that has been rejected by its owner, or represents the residual trace of experience, provides the conceptual basis for the work. Yet the materials themselves are also compelling on an emotional level in their challenge to traditional notion of success and failure. "I am interested in these instant 'Scratch and Win' tickets because they embody the hopes and desires of ordinary people who dream of becoming millionaires. At the same time, the odds of winning in lottery games reveal a different reality of risk and loss."

spring/summer 2001 >a

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