Still Life III 2021
video, glass, wood panels 12 x 7 feet     Drawing from feminist history, Minimalism, and performance art, my work investigates the relationship between the performance of identity, its fragmented nature, and its location within systems of power. The Still Life series emerged with an interest to destabilize the notion of the image as I explored the weight of images both physically and metaphorically. If image has weight, who is holding it? I approach this question by considering image as woman, and woman as image, and how both function as apparatuses exploited to sustain the status quo. Each work from the series includes a video performance that utilizes the seesaw as a surface to construct a still life.     Jessi Ali Lin is an interdisciplinary artist working with and through sculpture, video, performance, and embodiment. Her work uses the notion of positionality both in terms of physical position and the multivalence of identity. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.


Recently I have been thinking about femininity in relationship to resistance. What does resistance look like when there is no space for collective public resistance? I have been understanding femininity as a form and strategy of captivity. Like the wooden horse that entered the city of Troy, femininity performs a subordinate facade that acts as a shield and allows for infiltration.