Jean Shin: Common Threads

Shin employs a meticulous process of dismantling and alteration to create evocative sculptural installations that are composed of everything from worn shoes and lost socks to broken umbrellas and discarded lottery tickets. The resulting assemblages consist of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of seemingly identical objects gathered from friends, relatives, and perfect strangers.

Shin's most recent project, Everyday Monuments, debuts in the exhibition. The sprawling installation consists of nearly 2000 trophies donated by Washington, D.C.-area residents and projected images of the altered trophies. Inspired by the well-known historic monuments and heroic statuary displayed throughout Washington’s public spaces, Everyday Monuments venerates the accomplishments of ordinary Americans—stay-at-home moms, waitresses, janitors, postal carriers—whose everyday labors go unrecognized. Shin transformed each figurine to represent these tasks. The trophies are arranged according to a scale plan of the National Mall, symbolically filling the expanse of Washington's signature public space.

This exhibition also includes the largest installation to date of Chance City, a towering cityscape of scratch-and-win lottery tickets, whose inevitable collapse serves as a metaphor for the illusory promise of fast money; Chemical Balance III, a towering arrangement of empty prescription pill bottles that speaks to a dependency on prescription medications; and Unraveling, a dense, brightly colored web of woolen threads that visualizes the network of relationships within the Asian American arts community. The exhibition is organized by Joanna Marsh, The James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art