Line Project Installation ft. Casey Gao inspired by Rebecca Horn’s Unicorn (1970-72)
intent blurb:
The closet as a place of refuge and silence is revisited through this project. It becomes a haven, mimicking the fortresses I made as a child with complex amalgamations of cyclically used furniture and blankets, and an uncomfortable combustion of lines and overlain string waiting to erupt outwards and move from its intended space. In revisiting the idea of a closet, I remembered how I would lay in mine when upset, taking pillows, blankets, and small snacks to camp away from reality. The closet continued to become a place for expressing my inner world, and it has gone through several evolutions. The clothes I gutted out of it for this project are each attached to a unique memory of hand me downs, gifts, graduation, and impulsively bought pieces, representative of my life trajectory. However, I rebuild the space and the feeling it personally evokes through my subject and her interaction with the jungle of yarn and twine held up against hangers. In visiting New York at the end of Wintersession, I was enamored by Rebecca Horn’s “Unicorn” in which she expresses the vulnerability and limitations of the human body with her subject serving as a mobile extension of herself and imagination. In existing within the reality of society, these limitations in self-expression and the body are understandably felt by people made to live amongst the margins of society. This concept is re-expressed through my own experiences and the concept of the closet through a queer lens. My subject, made to mimic a unicorn, wears a hat with strings with additional attachments to create the growth of a beard. This is symbolic of gender fluidity but simultaneously features the magic unicorn as an emblem to represent the queer community. More overtly, fruit is placed around her, alluding to the reclamation of historically derogatory terms used against LGBTQ+ individuals.