Over 20 years ago I first started seeing Jean Shin’s work around Manhattan and Brooklyn, during the early 2000s era when cell phones were gaining popularity in the mainstream and the internet had not yet exploded into what it is now. Shin’s installations always made a strong impression, notably for their labor-intensive obsessiveness and their ability to isolate notions of accumulation and garbage—and thereby ecology and environmentalism—as pressing topics to be exposed through art. “Jean Shin: Bodies of Knowledge,” at the Dorsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz through December 7, is a candid look at these same concepts with the full-blown cell phone-and-internet-addicted culture of today as the anchor for this intelligent show, which is curated by Sophie Landres.
Shin, who lives in Hurley, is a master at transforming discarded materials into large-scale artworks that expose our consumption habits, and her works are a meta-narrative about massiveness and metamorphosis. These installations inspire urgent questions: Where does it all go? The introductory wall text is a poignant prelude that addresses the deliberate nature of Shin’s “exaggerations in scale” and the non-negotiable vision of “staggering amounts of waste” as represented in her installations, all of which points to the “often overlooked physicality that underpins and sustains human knowledge.”
The first artwork to encounter after the reality-check-gut-punch of that introductory text is Surge (2013), consisting of black electrical plugs that cascade down the wall, a vision of rubbish turned ravishing. Shin’s past installations have included junked objects such as pill bottles, worn shoes, lottery tickets, and other oddities. With “Bodies of Knowledge,” piles of cables, cell phones, and computer parts are the main characters of her story, and Huddle Masses (2020/2025) is the star of this show. Featuring a sea of computer wires swirling on the ground, three monster-like sculptures comprised of dead cell phones rise from the chaotic jumble of cords, their phallus-like stature appearing both ominous and hypnotic. Standing up close to them, we identify every make and model of chunky blackberries and flimsy flip-phones that once ruled the land, offering a kind of anthropological study in the development of cell phone culture.
Positioned nearby are three round E-Bundle (2019) sculptures made of bright-colored bundled laptop parts, hard drives, electrical cords, and ethernet cables. Frankly speaking, the surrealist in me interpreted the scene as a “cock-and-balls” scenario, perhaps an unanticipated aspect of these artworks in relation to each other. The pile-on effect of these artworks could easily mushroom to fill the entire museum and engulf us all—such is the disconcerting feeling that infuses Shin’s art with its critical minimalist-meets-maximalist edge.
Shin’s interactive sculpture TEXTtile (2006) is a long strip of computer keycaps that starts with a functioning keyboard that allows the viewer to type a message that appears on a screen at the other end. Given the nearly 20-year lag between the making of this piece and the AI-driven culture of today, the physical integrity of this installation is an analog experience that highlights the sprawling monstrosity of artificial intelligence as a dematerialized new world order.
Before departing I took a moment to look at the entirety of the show, and I saw a room filled with trash as remodeled by Shin (indeed that gut-punch feeling again). Even with the idea of “connection” as the cerebral baseline of these artworks—computers and phones as the way in which society stays linked—the overriding thought was “disconnection.” As the electronic garbage piles higher still, Shin’s creative repositioning of these defunct technological objects suggests that our collective knowledge is increasingly compromised by bodies of trash now beyond our comprehension.
