Jean Shin, “On Shin’s Labor-Intensive Installations, which Transform Discarded Items of Everyday Use into Expressions of Identity and Community”
31 March 2010, 19:00 EST
Lesley University
Marran Theater
34 Mellen St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Jean Shin has garnered national attention for her labor-intensive instalations that transform accumulations of discarded objects into visually alluring, conceptually rich works and that act as expressions of identity and community. One of Shin’s instalations, Everyday Monuments (2009), was a roiling, packed crowd in miniature, occupying a 45″ long space. The figures are 2,000 gleaming sports trophies altered to represent people who may have never won trophies but instead labor as janitors, mailmen, auto mechanics, etc. In a past work, Shin gathered hundreds of cuffs of fabric out from the bottoms of pants, stiffened them in wax, and installed a cityscape of cuffs across the floor, suggesting a population that did not measure up and alluding to the largely Asian immigrant tailor workforce in NYC. Shin’s work has been exhibited at MOMA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and Galerie Dupont in Paris, among others.
