Beyond the Artist’s Hand: A Visit to Jean Shin’s Studio
Dec 3, 2010

On October 28, the participants in the Whitney course, “Beyond the Artist’s Hand,” visited the Brooklyn studio of artist Jean Shin, best known for her site-specific installations involving otherwise forgotten everyday objects. “Beyond the Artist’s Hand” examines a wide range of contemporary art practices and the ways in which artists, like Shin, have moved away from conventional materials for art making. During the studio visit, Shin explained her progression from early experiments with discarded objects to large-scale museum installations such as Everyday Monuments, commissioned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2009. In this work, Shin assembled thousands of sports trophies culled from the local community and, with the help of studio assistants, refashioned the trophy figures to hold handcrafted miniatures of work tools such as lawn mowers, baby strollers, hammers, and laptops. As Shin described it, these refashioned trophies symbolized the “unsung heroes” of the American work force.

For her latest project, Unlocking, commissioned by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona in 2010, Shin asked community members to invite friends and family to trace the serrated contours  of shared key sets for a large-scale wall drawing. The drawing created a linear landscape of ridges and valleys that echoed the mountainous Scottsdale terrain and linked the donors in what the artist called “an ever growing horizon line of connections.” For the course participants, the studio visit provided valuable insight into how artists are forging a new aesthetic language from the ordinary items of everyday living.

By Alix Finkelstein, Education intern