Ongoing series, originally presented at 47 Gallery in Toronto. I’m Not Welcome is a creative endeavour that concerns a house fire that took place in 2021 at Lin’s property in Kimberly, Ontario, ravaging nearly every material possession. Works in varying degrees of injury or repair include large stones that have been mended with bronze caps that were cast from their shed material. This work digests the ordinary and inhospitable layers of grief through the methodical and compulsive practise of material processing. I’m Not Welcome is a collection, processing station and care ward that diarizes and mends things lost and stolen.
A 10-foot tower of repurposed Weston bread racks is filled with ashen kitchen-wares, pools of molten aluminum, a petrified nest of electrical wire, and charred bits of paper and cloth. A few feet away stands an equally soaring and industrial vibrating sifter. When put to work, the sieve sighs and exhales a percussive range of hums, rattles and clangs; sounds that harken back to the notion that, through this work, Lin is constructing industry-like fabrication systems that mimic his own highly productive and energetic praxis.
Surface treatments vary from the rough-hewn and granular contents exhumed from the bed of the fire to plump, rippled layers of women’s goat-skin opera gloves. While some pieces take inventory and scientific measurements of the fire-born material, others distort the gravity of loss by relishing in their own lightness and sensuality, like the neutral, disinterested stance of a pair of white Tabi boots that encapsulate a sexual character – notably, disembodied. Also, the playful reflection of a loose flaxen leaf that grips the hard edge of a fire-licked stone. These newly-formed objects are fixations on the deformed, vestigial souvenirs of Lin’s family home and represent every archeological recovery from the architecture to the bedding.
This work not only represents but is the very raw state after loss. It is the mundane objects of ordinary living that were strewn across a hundred-acre property by whipping winds that accelerated the total destruction of a home. It is the medicinal process of gathering, sifting, and displaying and also the total submission to the yearning and brooding trance of the outcast – the “unwelcome.” It is the loss of a fantasy and the hopeful search for reconnection between father and son.