Tiffany Lin: A Systems Theory
Tiffany Lin, US Hemi-1 Census 3020 Questionnaire, print edition of 250, 2021. Photo D.K. Sole.
Tiffany Lin, A Systems Theory
On view at Left of Center Art Gallery, North Las Vegas through August 21.
By D.K. Sole
Tiffany Lin’s practice moves between the stillness of her objects and the communal action of performances and workshops. She works with signs: a flag, a classroom chalkboard, or, here in A Systems Theory, a census form and the image of an unpeopled beach. With these signs she “examines how power is expressed in the subtext of American vernacular,” to quote her website. They are embedded mores made visible: the “moral resonance” of a flag is witnessed and physically manipulated in her Codes performances, and the learned (I mean we learnt it as children) here-ness – the call for special, placed attention – of the chalkboard on the wall in the PROOF installation is used to point at the whereness of the virtual classroom. This question of “Where?” runs through much of her work. If the American history in Systems Theory is made of facts and data and dates then where is that? How does this vanished somethingness do? (What it does is all around us, and perhaps by striving to see the show clearly we will see that more clearly too – this seems to be her hope or her promise.)
Most of the beach imagery appears in 24 Views, a series of drawings accompanied by an expansive social practice project that manifested itself in this exhibition as a community workshop. In the drawings she “investigates the history of racial classification through US Census data” by cropping the beach into a circle and using different shades of seawater as pie chart wedges. Each wedge is dedicated to one of the racial categories tallied by the census. They fatten or shrink with the changing years. Each round sea is accompanied by a date and a single word like “Proclaim” or “Arrive”, hinting at “a major historical event from that decade.” “Hint” is a good word here – the drawings in isolation don’t clarify themselves, a fact she acknowledges by providing you with an explanatory document called “Drawing Parameters”. You don’t have to read it though. And this cool, open invitation to examine clues without encountering a decisive answer is one of the show’s strengths. The American present is a palimpsest, and palimpsests are not decisive.
Now the graphite beaches are preceded by a video of a real beach. This real beach is haunted by the subtitled voice of a worried, invisible speaker who is trying to work out what to do with the presence of some unwanted newcomers. In the room after the video that haunted tone is gone and you’re confronted by a stack of census forms on a small table. You can fill them in (the artist provides pens), but they’re dated 3020 and one of the questions asks if you’re a citizen of more than one planet so all of your answers are going to be lies. The urgency of the previous room flies away as you read this form. Now you can play at being an interworldly cyborg. It strikes you that both the video-voice and the census forms are looking for answers, though one is sincere, questing, thoughtful, while the other strides along with bureaucratic confidence. If the voice on the beach can be understood as a Native American, centuries ago, speculating about a future with settlers in the country, then is this form from 3020 the future they’re staring forward to? But look, if this future is not real then it hasn’t happened yet, it is open; we can create it. A drawing of text on the wall repeats “This is this is this is” until on the last line it inserts the word “necessary” but the fantasy census is not necessary and the authoritarian force it represents is a chimera. The future is there to be occupied by imagination. She makes the same argument on the skirting boards, creating spaces among the historical incidents for dreamt-up futures and unimagined pasts. The words “There There 2060” are on the same plane as the Civil Rights Act and the three-fifths compromise.
A Systems Theory is filled with representations of things, facts, “thises” that “are”, whether they’re dates or percentages or historical events, but in Lin’s hands they are presented obliquely, rearranged, and questioned (necessary, really?) until their aura of inevitability becomes malleable. It seems telling that the only living creatures she represents directly are snakes – sculptures of snakes – fluid, curved with movement. The materiality of the show puts facts in a state of suspension. The absence of change between the formats of the last two drawing-centric rooms (the paper rectangles lining up behind the formality of plexiglass) closes us into a dreamy asylum of angles, of data, of history: a vision of imperfectly reflective mirrors. The event is not inside the text or the picture. The data is the echo of the thing that is gone.
Tiffany Lin, installation view, Mama, video, 4 min. 21 sec. 2021. All gallery photo documentation by Mikayla Whitmore, courtesy the artist.
Tiffany Lin, A Systems Theory is on view at Left of Center Art Gallery, North Las Vegas through August 21, 2021. Learn more about Lin’s project 24 Views here.
Published by Wendy Kveck on August 4, 2021