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Zarina's wire installation Hanging in There also underscores this tenuousness. In this piece, a number of houses made of wire are linked in a twelve-foot line, held together by a single strand of thin black linen thread, Two-dimensional wire structures are molded in the shape of small homes with skeletal, generic suggestions of walls and a roof. Each home is almost identical to the last, the connection between individual elements preserved by the thin line. Shin's and Zarina's sculptures illuminate the precarious nature of home and its fabrication. They unravel its con- instruction by inviting the viewer to consider in- between spaces at the intersection of two wires or the geometric arrangement of cards. Here, moments of uncertainty and potential collapse rise to the fore. Dividing Lines In their current works in progress, Shin and Zarina use the methodology of the line to question con- instructions of community and nation. Lines come to represent people and locations that have emo- tional resonance; social domains are signified by an absence of the material figure and place. Zarina's art centers on rendering human experi- ence in its most essential form. Her recent works Maps of Delhi and Dividing Lines: Borders I have Crossed (working title) chronicle her lifelong migration as abstracted into a series of straight lines. The artist points to her own experiences of dislocation as the impetus for this work using strong and rigid lines to emphasize the artificiality of national boundaries. "The project came from the experience of visiting my parents in Pakistan. When you're traveling through these countries, it is very strange how you just step over the border. I would cross a border that didn't really exist between India and Pakistan. I found it both strange and painful." The criss-crossed lines act as a symbolic marking for the thirty-two nations and four continents she has traveled. "Borders that are natural generally seem to occur along rivers and mountains...the borders in these pieces are drawn with a ruler." Exposing the cal- culated nature of inventing or enforcing national borders, specifically those which confine colo- nized countries, the piece contests home as an originary, fixed place. Dividing lines play an equally important role in Shin's new piece, entitled Rolodex Project: Drawing Connections, which highlights the arbitrary aspect of social divisions within notions of community. "The Rolodex project began with a network of lines drawn by the artist's community of friends, family, professional contacts, casual acquaintances, etc." Each person leaves a unique mark by drawing a line across the front and back of one entry in a blank rolodex. Shin's project focuses on enumerating interpersonal relation- ships; Zarina's, meanwhile, gathers together the sum total of her boundary crossing in a configu- ration just as obtuse. Rolodex Project: Drawing Connection and Dividing Lines: Borders I have Crossed, transform human experience into exten- sive collections of lines. Both investigate the line as it simultaneously works to connect and frag- meant multiple realities. The lines in turn point to an essential insignificance or anonymity of the people whom Shin encounters or the countries Zarina has traversed. Instead, they reconsider issues of community and identity by questioning traditional geographic and social divisions. Through a daily process of carefully balancing lotto tickets upon one another, a precarious struc- true is fabricated from the refuse of dreams deferred. Shin's house of cards is not secured by adhesive. The work thus becomes subject to arbi-trary temporal and spatial shifts. The assemblage could sway and fall apart at any moment, depend- ing upon the time of day, strength of a passing breeze, or the impact of a viewer's footsteps traversing the gallery space. Characterized by its own reconstruction, this unstable architectural structure points to the tenous nature of home. At the same time, it reveals the American dream's insistence upon a level of material success that few can realistically achieve. Chance City stages an ongoing collapse and regeneration of the American dream. To be shown at Art in General, New York this spring, the works will continue its site-specific transformations and eventually every back to a collection of unwanted lotto tickets. Shin's fragile house of cards takes on a more trou- bling quality when the viewer begins to calculate the monetary value the accumulation signifies. Chance City uses the object of the abandoned ticket to expose the contradictions at work in pop- ular narratives of the immigrant fream. Purchased at a few dollars each in their previous lives, these essentially worthless scraps of paper once held the elusive promise of thousands.
