Portrait of MC as Corpse, circa 2009-2010
Watercolor and ink on paper
Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection
Gift of Marcus Civin
2020.02

Candice Lin is possibly best known for her large – sometimes room-sized – installations that illustrate overlooked aspects of worldwide colonial history through a radical array of materials including urine, silkworms, clocks, and dirt. Like most artists, she continues to be active even when she is not making work directly intended for museums or gallery shows. This work was a gift for one of her collaborators, Marcus Civin. Although they are not part of her official oeuvre we can see parallel ideas running between the different bodies of work, from monstrous human figures similar to those in her formal drawings such as Preparation for a Re-Gendered Society (2009) and Sycorax’s Collections (Happiness) (2011), to invented ethnographies that suggests a sympathetic link to her large-scale reimaginings of indigenous histories. Just as Lin concerns herself with the parts of history that official records neglect, so objects like these can remind us that every artist’s life contains works that remain off the record. (DKS)

To watch our Virtual Tour of this piece, please click on the following link: Barrick Museum of Art Virtual Tour - Candice Lin.

Image description:
A framed ink drawing of a nude male human figure lying in a horizontal position across the center of the image. Some of the figure’s interior anatomy is visible, including its veins, arteries, rib cage, and several organs. They are colored in light gray and red. One arm is above the figure’s head and the other is partly extended out towards the bottom of the image. The figure is surrounded by irregular shapes colored brown, gray, and beige (written by Andrea Noonoo).