...writing
The Animal Husband, 2024
Vampires in Space, 2022
Walking into Candace Lin’s The Animal Husband is like walking into a fever dream. The balcony is lit like a red-light district; a single collar hangs in the air below; a monstrous ceramic form (Piss Protection Demon) guards the exhibition’s entrance. The exhibition centres around its namesake, which is a video projected onto a rotating screen. Narrated by the artist’s cat, the subject matter evolves from colonialism to bestiality to animal husbandry, and ends with him pondering, “Where does the ball juice go?” The Animal Husband, or, the animals, have taken over the Georgian Gallery of Talbot Rice, previously a natural history museum. Its grand and regal airs have been rightly reclaimed, the balcony walls etched with crude words and drawings. These etchings are not labelled or in the guide, which makes it feel as if the cats themselves scratched violently into the walls: “I’M YOURS”, “RUB ME”. They certainly didn’t clear up after themselves; paint shavings lay on the floor under each scratch in protest. Humans are lauded as flesh lumps, but I’m not sure if we’re predator or prey.
Lin makes clear we can be both, referencing Scotland’s history of medical innovation, in The Moon/Inside Out, an Alien-esque (capital A, à la Sigourney Weaver) ceramic gleaming white under a spotlight. Something is most definitely Inside its orifice. I peer through the vagina of this disembodied abdomen, which sits on a plinth pressed with makeup marks from overeager chins and lips looking for a nosy inside. This dissection of the female form, combined with its blatant encouragement of voyeurism, is haunted with histories of violent misogyny, racism and classism for the sake of science. The stop-motion animation flickers inside; its audio rattles around the inside of the womb, grating and tinny. The figures the animation depicts are slapstick, but the way their bodies come apart is not. The audience has become part of the problem, but Lin makes us feel naive for ever thinking we weren’t.
Playful feline musings on castration included, Win builds a world where humanity is not the main character, or, in curator James Clegg’s words, Win “challenges human exceptionalism”. The Animal Husband is weird and wonderful, but still manages to make space for solemnity and reflection on human/animal/body relations.