Uncontained: categories always leak navigates colonial power, museological plunder, and global consumption through the concept of containment. Curated by Julianna Heller, Zoë Latzer, and Meghan Smith

This limited-edition print publication accompanies the exhibition uncontained:categories always leak, organized by the students of the CCA Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice. It features artwork documentation, original essays by the curators, artist interviews, and newly commissioned inserts by Consuelo Tupper Hernández and Shao-Feng Hsu.

ARTISTS:

Candice Lin:

Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works in installation, sculpture, drawing, ceramics, and video. Her work is multi-sensorial and often includes living and organic materials and processes. Lin lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She is co-founder and co-director of the artist-run collective and space Monte Vista Projects and is an assistant professor in the Department of Art at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture.

Cathy Lu:

Cathy Lu is an artist based in Richmond California. Her work manipulates traditional Chinese art objects and symbols as a way to deconstruct the assumptions about Asian American identity and cultural authenticity. By creating ceramic based sculptures and large scale installations, Luexplores what it means to be both Asian and American, while not being entirely accepted as either. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of the larger American identity is central to her work.

Larissa Rogers:

Rogers’ work looks at the intersections of culture, identity, and embedded forms of colonization expressed through perception and psyche. Combining aspects of memory, history, and personal experience, she forefronts the capaciousness of blackness by challenging the politics of hybridity, authenticity, and visibility as an Afro-Asian woman. Often asking the question, who and what survives? She simultaneously engages violence and care as co-constructive forces that structure Black and Brown life. By using materials that reference colonial histories Rogers re-contextualizes them to grapple with the entanglements of belonging and fugitivity, beauty and horror, life and death, opacity and transparency, care and resistance. 

Often using performance, sculpture, video, installation as methods of address, Rogers contends with the systems of commodification, representation, and female-identified subjectivity as shaped by the experience of diasporas. The body becomes an archive and vessel for collective memory and reimagining, while temporality provides pathways for de-colonial futures and alternative possibilities for Black and Asian people to exist.

Cammie Staros:

Cammie Staros creates sculptures and installations that mine Classical antiquities and the contexts in which we view them. Through a combination of ancient techniques, contemporary sensibility, and museological display, her work folds the past in on itself to reveal semiotic systems developed and reinforced through art history. Staros challenges the dominant narrative, which places the relics of her own Greek lineage at the origin of the Western canon, adding broader regional and epochal references to reflect the overlapping nature of visual influence.

Staros received her BA in Art and Semiotics from Brown University (2006) and her MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts (2011). She has presented solo exhibitions with Shulamit Nazarian, François Ghebaly, and Lefebvre & Fils galleries and has received several awards, grants, and residencies. Her work is currently on view in the Ceramics Biennial at the Craft Contemporary Museum and is featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, a Thames & Hudson survey of contemporary sculpture.

She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Stephanie Syjuco:

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital in order to investigate economics and empire. Her work has been exhibited widely at venues including MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, the 12th Havana Bienal, and the 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan). A longtime educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California, and is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery. (Artist portrait photo by Kija Lucas.)