Exhibit dates

Artist Christopher Lin’s Earth Bound, is on view at Goucher College’s Bond Art Display Window from March 25 - May 25, 2024. This exhibit is free and open to the public. Located in the Athenaeum, the Bond Window is viewable from the Van Meter Parkway in front of Mary Fisher Hall, or from the Athenaeum’s Van Meter entrance.

 

Artist reception & talk

A reception and cross-disciplinary artist talk will be held on Thursday, May 2, from 5 - 7 p.m. Panelists include artist Christopher Lin, Goucher science professor Germán Mora, and Goucher Art Galleries Director and Curator, Janna Dyk.

 

About the exhibit

Goucher is pleased to present a site-specific interdisciplinary installation by Baltimore-born, New York based artist Christopher Lin with live plants, moss, books, and medical devices.

Making work in response to his long-standing scientific research, Lin creates artworks about human and interspecies experiences of climate change.  

Lin’s Earth Bound is the first in a new experimental, interdisciplinary series exploring the intersections between art and climate change. The series engages the Bond Window, which is surrounded on three sides by floor to ceiling glass panels and is thus subject to a wide range of temperature variations, as a greenhouse environment.

 

Artist statement

“My practice envisions the ecologies we shape and inhabit in our current geologic era, the Anthropocene, in which human activity has profoundly impacted the planet and its biodiversity. Through collaborations and choreographed interactions with both living and non-living systems, I combine elements of scientific investigation and material exploration to construct performative sculptures and installations that incorporate familiar objects interacting in unfamiliar ways to encourage viewers to question the framework of our everyday world. Reflecting on my background in scientific research, my work animates concepts from biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental ecology with the poetics of artistic assemblage. Experimental play transforms into thoughtful contemplation as I embed organic materials, such as teeth, brain coral, and sensitive plants, within a synthetic world of hand sanitizers, polystyrene, and the magenta glow of LED grow lamps to render the science-fiction nature of our reality. More interested in the poetics of re-contextualization than representation, I collect, deconstruct, and recombine materials to create chimeras that reflect on the existential trauma of today's persistent environmental anxiety. These ephemeral constructions allude to their impermanence and, by proxy, our own.

In Earth Bound at Goucher Art Galleries, I imagined the unique gallery space of the Rosalie Bond Window through a science fiction lens. Inspired by the NASA Clean Air Study and collective dreams of space colonization, this installation envisions the duality of being bound to Earth, our home, while simultaneously searching for an Earth elsewhere in the cosmos. In the installation forms reach for sustenance in various ways finding themselves uprooted, surviving through highly artificial conditions.

Vasculature (2022-24) visualizes an organism reaching for the means to sustain itself. A double-walled vessel contains Sphagnum moss and a reservoir of water, separated by a barrier of glass. Coiled and twisted tubing connects the two sides allowing humid air and condensed water droplets to travel from one end to the other performing a circulatory system.

Cairn (2024) builds a waystone from research texts. A mossy rock sits at the top of the structure, sweating profusely within a helmet-like apparatus as it balances precariously on its accumulated knowledge.

What do you call the world? (2018) suspends five plants in gravity, forcing them to grow in highly artificial conditions toward the magenta glow of modern grow lights. As the sun sets, natural light gives way to harsh fluorescence.”

 

Artist bio

Growing up in Baltimore, Christopher Lin is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator with a background in research science. Fueled by a lifelong obsession with fossils, his experimental installations, sculptures, and performances question the world we inhabit and envision the one we will leave behind. Often collaborating with non-human organisms and wider ecologies, his time-based works synthesize elements of environmental ecology with Zen poetics to explore the interconnected nature of our material world.

After receiving a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from Hunter College, Lin received the C12 Emerging Artist Award in 2016. He has shown work and performed throughout New York City, including at: SVA Curatorial Practice, ABC No Rio, Recess Art, Flux Factory, Wave Hill, the United Nations Headquarters, the Bronx Museum, and the Queens Museum. He was a 2020 Bronx Museum AIM Emerging Artist Fellow, a 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace Artist-in-Residence, and a 2023 Swale Lab Resident Artist. He currently teaches at Hunter College and Parsons at the New School and is co-director of the research-based artist collective, Sprechgesang Institute.

 

Artwork Photos

(top) Christopher Lin, Vasculature, 2022-2024, Glass, PVC vinyl tubing, IV pole, LED lights, sphagnum moss, and water

(middle) Christopher Lin, What do you call the world?, 2018