Genesis Belanger: Coins for the Ferryman || Candice Lin: Meaningless Squiggles
2245 E Washington Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90021
Friday, May 17 at 6:00 PM 9:00 PM
Ends Jun 16, 2019
François Ghebaly is pleased to announce Coins for the Ferryman, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Genesis Belanger. The liminal space–an anthropological term that refers to the time between the what was and the next–is a central theme in Belanger’s work. It is a place of transition, of waiting and not knowing what comes next. The show’s title, Coins for the Ferryman, alludes to crossing the threshold of the river Styx, a mythological liminal space where dead souls pay the ferryman to traverse from the realm of the living to arrive in Hades, the land of the dead. ****** François Ghebaly is proud to present Meaningless Squiggles, Candice Lin’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition takes a panoramic view of Lin’s recent projects, drawing on her expanded research into subjects ranging from Chinese “coolie” labor in the Caribbean, James Baldwin’s travels outside the U.S., plants that heal and hurt, disciplinary masks used as Medieval European public shaming devices and their formal similarity to slave torture devices, and John Searle’s writings on artificial intelligence. Seemingly disparate, these topics are connected by a consideration of the entangled movements of people, plants, viruses and other species. Lin uses these histories of migration and control to think about how ideas of toxicity, contamination, humanness and usefulness are categories that become racialized, implemented and then blurred through State and social disciplinary processes. What arises from these far flung subjects is a practice restlessly and persistently investigating material pasts, tracing objects and their histories to open up discourses around race, value and the economies of dehumanization.