Homo Lanterns, 2020

Real-time simulation, projection mapping; projectors, tripod, computer, electric cords.

Installation video. Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull, Roski Mateo Gallery, Los Angeles, California, July 2 – 10, 2021.

Installation video. Don’t Look Now, Human Resources, Los Angeles, California, May 3 – 12, 2021.

Installation video. Don’t Look Now, Human Resources, Los Angeles, California, May 3 – 12, 2021. Video by Jackie Castillo.

Installation views

Installation view. Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull, Roski Mateo Gallery, Los Angeles, California, July 2 – 10, 2021

Exhibited

Don’t Look Now

“Don’t look now” is a demand to defer—and an apt characterization of the mood of the past year. Danie Cansino, Jiyoon Kim, Hings Lim, Jose Guadalupe Sanchez III, Diane Williams, and Rachel Zaretsky—the USC Roski MFA class of 2021—have spent the past year making work in a suspended state, in the face of isolation and slow-motion tragedy, wherein time no longer seemed linear.

Temporal glitching characterizes Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film, Don’t Look Now, as early as its first sequence, in which a then-inexplicable red mirage spills across a piece of slide film. Blood, paint, chemical; it’s unclear exactly what the substance is, but it is clear that it is foreboding insofar as it immediately disrupts the logic of time. Slide film should record the past, but this particular image, of a church in Venice, Italy, is more refraction than reflection.

The works included in Don’t Look Now also function as prisms of a sort: reflections, windows, ghostly presences, premonitions, and portals pervade. Installed and documented at Human Resources in April, for an audience that would only view it later on screens, the work is undeniably touched by temporal confusion. Through mirrored narratives, Don’t Look Now doubles as a retort to and record of limitations imposed upon these six artists, who all found ways to deepen their practices in spite of the demand to defer.

Organized by Hugo Cervantes, Kate Rouhandeh, and Rachel Zaretsky.

Enter

Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull

Roski Mateo Gallery
1262 Palmetto Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013
July 2 – 10, 2021

In Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull, Hings Lim uses installation, sculpture, image, performance, and place to propose a rumination on the space between human and nonhuman. Underlying this body of work are the varied cultural and spiritual influences present in his home region of Southeast Asia. Lim employs technology, alternate reality, ritual, and artifact as mechanisms that expose and explore a specific liminality. This liminality, however, is not static, but rather, constantly moving and essential to the in-flux and cyclical nature of becoming.

The subtitle, machine, animal, plant, stone, skull alludes to the material objects and semiotics that Lim both, challenges the limitations of and draws inspiration from. The works throughout the exhibition are performing in space by revealing their own individual and interrelation subjectivities. A carefully crafted biface candle, flickering in the wind; a haunting, yet unimposing hominid skull, floating in mid-air; a digitally-rendered tree sharing the stories of the land, come together as meditations on the entangled relationship between technology, nature, and ghost. Shadows, lights, sounds, and performativity manifest as immaterial and intangible, yet undeniably present within the gallery. Lim gazes towards both the future and the past by collapsing, and simultaneously zooming-in on the concept of time. In doing so, through this exhibition he gives way to reconsiderations of linearity, evolution, death, and perception.

Imperceptible: machine, animal, plant, stone, skull offers viewers (im)material and (dis)embodied touchstones on which to reflect and constellate between, while ultimately gesturing towards new possibilities for sensing (non)human subjectivity through time and space.

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Curated by Carlo Tuason and Kate Rouhandeh.

References

Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).

“Toumaï, The Human Adventure,” Chad, Cradle of Humanity?, https://chadcradlehumanity.monsite-orange.fr/index.html.