Yen-Chao Lin and Justine Skahan
© Photo credits: Yen-Chao Lin, 2024
© Photo credits: Justine Skahan, 2024
HOST
Exhibition: March 8, 2024 to April 20, 2024
Opening: March 8, 2024 at 5 pm. Meet at articule for the opportunity to meet the artists!
Discursive activity: Saturday, March 23, 2024. More info soon.
Before night sets in, on a road, cutting through a forest, navigating an island, trying to tease a memory out of tangled nostalgia, through a window, past a curtain, peeking in, peeking out, the works of Yen-Chao Lin and Justine Skahan explore notions of home and displacement. With a firm footing in the gap between the tangible and the impalpable, Skahan’s paintings elicit the isolation of the meandering traveler, a lone stranger whose wandering eyes perch upon new dwellings and landscapes. A natural collector, in more sense than one, Lin extracts new stories out of old objects, weaving new memories and purpose into abandoned materials, crafting a tactile domestic yearning into her sculptures. Home, the boundaries, whether hospitable or hostile between guest and host, figure prominently in these artists’ work and we are very excited to present them at articule this spring.
Exhibition text
HOST - Yen-Chao Lin & Justine Skahan
by Célia Mourey
The exhibition explores the complexity of the notion of home, often perceived as universal despite inequitable accessibility. It also questions the concepts of security, intimacy and sharing associated with it, through the distinct artistic approaches of Yen-Chao Lin and Justine Skahan.
The works exhibited by Justine Skahan are the result of an itinerant artistic residency in the coastal and isolated regions of Quebec and the Maritimes. By exploring these isolated territories, she questions notions of housing and home, challenging the ideas of proximity, community and stability usually associated with them. She highlights the precarity of access to a home, interrogating the need for an enclosed space to define this concept, and proposes a new perspective on our relationship with wide open spaces, landscapes, light and nature in general. Skahan's paintings also explore the notion of security that surrounds the home. They depict twilight landscapes devoid of human presence, as well as scenes taken from crime documentaries or thrillers, evoking an atmosphere of hostility or fear. Despite this sometimes hostile atmosphere, a certain gentleness emanates from these vast expanses.
In the following part of the exhibition, visitors metaphorically enter the physical intimacy of the home as they pass through an initial sculpture evoking a traditional door decoration, symbolizing the entrance to Yen-Chao Lin’s home. Dioramas with peepholes allow the public to observe the interiors on display, reinforcing the sense of voyeurism associated with visiting the home, whether as a guest or as cohabitant. The artist invites visitors to explore the intimacy of her childhood home, but it's up to the audience to perform the intrusive gesture. The dioramas offer an immersive experience of the house as a whole, blending authentic memories of the artist's childhood in Taipei in the '80s with fictional ones. These interiors abound in symbols for the public to decipher through the prism of the artist's childhood, her intimate experiences and the viewer's individual perspective.
« Host » also invites environmental reflection, notably on the massive accumulation of manufactured resources in the home. The maritime landscapes, for their part, conceal the consequences of global warming that these geographically vulnerable spaces are suffering (floods, fires, etc.).
© Photo Credits : Paul Litherland, HOST, 2024.
Yen-Chao Lin 林延昭 is a Taipei-born Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist. Having grown up in a multifaith family, she is interested in religion, spirituality, divination arts, dowsing, occult sciences, alchemy, oral tradition, and power - everything that can be sensed, but not necessarily seen. As a natural history enthusiast and an avid collector, Yen-Chao gathers specimens of mineral, botanical, animal and industrial origins, including objects that stare at the vestiges of a recent or distant past, with a story to tell. Through means of intuitive play, collaboration, scavenging and collecting, her tactile practice often incorporates various craft techniques, such as copper enameling, textile, and glass; creating installations, sculptures, and experimental films.
Yen-Chao's works have been shown at Art Metropole (Toronto), Berlinale, Hong-gah Museum (Taipei), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, OBORO (Montreal), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art (Montreal), among others.
For this duo exhibition that considers the communion and tension relating to concepts of home, house, housing, domesticity, landscape and nature, Yen-Chao is showing an array of sculptures including diorama peephole boxes, a maze patterned rug with a hidden message, and an impossible doorway curtain installation. Each piece is an intimate study of the domestic environment, ranging from the physical architecture, to the invisible mindscape and the multilayered individual experiences within the home. Certain works evoke common nostalgic household objects and decorations, while others are windows of escape from daily life. Many works are created with traditional craft techniques such as vitreous enamel and latch hooked rug. Most of the materials used were from the artist's collection of found objects and home renovations.
Justine Skahan holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Ottawa. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in Brooklyn, NY; Treviso, Italy; Reykjavik, Iceland, and throughout Quebec and Ontario. She has participated in artist residencies through Occurrence and Admare in Quebec and the Maritimes, at the Banff Centre, at the Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture in Dawson City, and SÌM Residency in Reykjavik. Past awards include the Stonecroft Venice Scholarship and the René Payant Award, both from the University of Ottawa, as well as being shortlisted for the 2016 RBC Canadian Painting prize. In 2023, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant for painting and drawing. Upcoming residencies include one at Galerie Stewart Hall in Pointe-Claire, one at Atelier Impression Numérique at Bâtiment 7 in Montreal, and one at Daïmon artist-run centre in Gatineau.
In 2022, I spent a month participating in a solo “wandering” residency, driving through unfamiliar parts of Quebec and the Maritimes. During this isolating time as a wanderer, never interacting with a familiar face, I sometimes had the sense I was disappearing. This feeling of dissolution is the motivation for my recent paintings set in the almost-dark. Fascinated by the quality of the light in many places I visited, I was reminded of the sublime – a feeling of equal fear and awe elicited by encounters with the natural world.
In these paintings, I hope to capture this feeling of tenuousness. Some paintings are based on pictures I took during the residency in the hour after sundown. Other paintings are based on screen captures from thriller and true crime TV shows, media which often depict the landscape as an atmosphere of ambient danger. I am interested in the sense of security implied by a house/home and how that relates to Western constructions of the landscape as separate from the self.