July 7 - September 24, 2016

Through her eclectic style of painting, sculpture and wall drawing, San Francisco-based artist Carey Lin built an installation at ISP by culling patterns from community participants, friends, acquaintances, and her day-to-day life. In this evolving environment, Lin asked questions about patterns of attraction and the potential of the creative process to transform seemingly mundane objects into meaningful experience.

To build the installation, Lin invited the public to bring items to be photographed and small objects to be traced for inclusion in the installation. Contributors shared imagery on Instagram using the hashtag #nobodysaidnotto. Lin rendered those elements and combined them with imagery selected from her daily life: patterns from the closets and homes of friends and acquaintances, objects found on neighborhood walks, images from store windows, posts on her social media feed, etc. Lin’s receptive installation reflected the different, highly variable visual interests of community participants, the artist’s social circle and the artist herself.

Throughout its run, Nobody Said Not To served as a platform for thinking about artistic intention, hierarchies of visual culture, and in the most basic terms, why we make art. Lin’s playful, obsessive, energetic studio practice stems from a critical investigation of the creative impulse.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carey Lin is a visual artist based in San Francisco, California. She earned her M.F.A. at the University of Chicago and her B.A. from New College of Florida. Aside from her individual studio practice, Lin directs Stairwell’s, a collaborative social practice project with site-specific programs in the Bay Area and beyond. She also creates a line of handmade ceramic sculptures under the moniker DONUT DEPOT.

Lin’s work has been exhibited at Artists’ Television Access (ATA), ampersand international arts (SF), Screen Share Video Gallery (Chicago), Tropical Contemporary (Eugene, OR), Root Division (SF), Aggregate Space Gallery (Oakland), tmoro projects (Santa Clara), City College of San Francisco, Martina }{ Johnston Gallery (Berkeley), Interface Gallery (Oakland), Tartine Bakery (San Francisco), Macarthur B Arthur Gallery (Oakland), Truesilver Gallery (San Francisco), Zughaus (Berkeley), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Samsøn Projects (Boston), DOVA Temporary (Chicago), and more.

Lin has been artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project (NY), Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow (Saugatuck, MI), Hayes Valley Art Works (SF), Wave Pool (Cincinnati, OH), Opossum House (Eugene, OR).