Smonica Lin — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Smonica Lin

(Art MFA 25)
IG: @smonicalin

Transfiguration, 2025

Smonica Lin’s Transfiguration suspends forms from ceiling to floor, creating a vertical axis between corresponding forms: a portal-like structure through which identity is meant to pass and transform. Working with everyday objects, kitchen tools, mesh, air clay, UV resin, chicken wire, beads, pins, thread, and latex tubes, synthesizing ready-mades into absurdist forms, Lin creates installations that spark uncanny familiarity. The viewer is meant to pause, caught between recognition and misrecognition. Familiar objects reconfigured into strange subjects ask us to look again at what we thought we understood. In some versions, audiences are invited to inject slime through syringes attached to the sculpture. They are meant to become an agent of transformation, literalizing external pressures that shape and deform our sense of self. The work emerges from Lin’s struggle to define identity in a world that demands constant self-construction.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025