Swollen with Life
Jiayun Chen, Sage Chen, Josh Cloud, Dominique Go, Carolina Hicks, Vanessa Holyoak, Ruoyi Shi
June 26th - July 12th
Opening Reception: Friday, June 26th | 6-9PM
Nocturnal Writing Workshop: Saturday, July 11th | 7-9PM
LA Artcore | 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
I’m swollen with life.
I start to dissolve……………… …… . ..my brain is bloated… ………………..………………
…… …………. with divine intervention!
It’s the only thing some of us have left…
this sacrament!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Everything is fragile……………………. Am I
in trouble?
It’s strawberry season. Yes ＊
As Earth rots and war rages, like a squirrel foraging for the winter, we collect and hoard the treasures of our everyday lives to feel alive, to be alive. Angel numbers… parasocial crushes… megamillions lotto ticket… eBay bid… a wink from a distance… pet names… anime… stuffed animal collection… I love you all so much! We are surrounded by heartbreak, but disembodied through love, belief, and delusion.
Swollen with Life is a group exhibition curated by artist, Dominique Go, investigating the distractions conjured in times of trouble. People’s tenacious fantasies and obsessions anchor hope in the drought of daily despair. Where do we go to get away, and how long should we stay?
This exhibition highlights an interest in human emotion, sociopolitical ethics, and hosts a dialogue between truth and manipulation/real and surreal. Swollen with Life captures a cultural/intimate dissociation from contemporary psychic pain through cathexis toward objects, happenstance, hijinks, etc. Cultivated from the curator’s intently curated eBay watchlist, this project questions the impulsiveness and imperativeness nature of distractions. Through playful installations, artists showcase the deluded fantasies, sick fixations, and sparkling escapism used as coping mechanisms to soften everyday absurdity. These mechanisms act as tactics of survival for the human spirit. Together the artworks confront topics such as belief, numbness, alternate possibility, and purpose.
Vanessa Holyoak will lead a Nocturnal Writing Workshop in tandem with the group exhibition on July 11th. Join us for the closing event of Swollen with Life at LA Artcore, an evening of guided embodied writing into the space of night.
Artist Bios
Jiayun Chen is an interdisciplinary artist working with drawing, painting, installation, and language. Having spent much of her life between China and the United States, Chen is interested in mistranslations, cultural detours, and the unexpected meanings that emerge when systems fail to contain them. Her work often begins with structures—language, calendars, patterns, routines—and follows the moments when they slip, mutate, or break apart.
I like stripes.
I like how they can mean order and disorder at the same time.
I like calendars, routines, repetition, and all the ways they fail.
I collect mistranslations, wrong turns, private jokes, and marks that
refuse to behave.
I breathe and in blank space.
I believe most structures contain their own escape routes.
I never wash my paint brush.
Sage Chen lives and works in Southern California with her long-term cat and collaborator, Liam. Together, their practice attempts to interpret cycles of infection that occur across the lattice of relation based out of the dirtied, abject, lived-in field of the domestic ecological.
Inspired by Scrat from Ice Age, a saber-toothed squirrel who chases an acorn at any cost, plummeting to near-death almost all of the time. May he eventually get to it and enjoy a light snack, and perhaps wear the cap as a hat :)
For he would trade his life for eternal bliss.
Josh Cloud (b. San Diego CA ) is a multimedia artist and educator based in LA. In 2021 Josh received a BFA from CalArts in experimental animation and art. His work is centered around personal experience, around black + queer questioning of american life, around being an over emotional pisces and wanting to cry a lot. His practice emerges from the primordial goo of his sketchbook, where the line can then be translated into sculpture and inflated to take up space in our physical world. Josh attended Skowhegan school of painting and sculpture in 2023, and is currently the interim ceramics director at CalArts.
Dominique Go (b. 1999; Manila, Philippines) is an interdisciplinary, LA based artist who received a BFA from CalArts in 2021. She uses post-ironic poetics and humor to process nebulous sociopolitical, ecological, mythological, and personal heartbreak. Through writing, drawing, collecting, gardening, and object making she investigates topics of mischief, love, power, freedom, and fun. More recently, her artwork explores wishes, and the border between real/fantasy, fate/ freedom.
wish machines is a project that explores the everyday symbology and machinery involved in making wishes. Weaving tactile, hand-built sculpture and found objects together, I follow an ephemeral sparkle. Found objects from my eBay watchlist and materials from the Santa Anita Race Track are decaled onto hand-built ceramics as an analog tool for digital preservation. Other sculptures involve recycled, hand-cut glitter and a hand-sewn, stuffed animal made from recycled fabric explore repurpose. This work is an attempt to use discarded materials to create sculptures with high-voltage, mental and emotional energy.
perfect objects is a fraction of my ongoing collection of stuffed animals and toys that I sourced myself or were given as gifts.
SLICE/HOOK is a collaboration between long-time friends, Dominique Go and Sage Chen. We were at Christine Yerie Lee’s birthday party making plans to mini-golf together and the idea to make a mini-golf sculpture was born. The 15 foot sculpture includes a hand-sewn cloak made from recycled fabric and porcelain skull, hands, and golf ball. The collaboration continued on as Jiayun Chen included one of her ceramic flagpoles and Ruoyi Shi added miniature barn houses to the floor installation. Alternative titles: Life’s a Beach, Life’s a Game, Bogey, Dogleg, Giggity Golf…
Carolina Hicks (b. 1991) is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist and writer. She runs the DIY publishing project 'perra press' and teaches experimental drawing at Otis College of Art & Design.
Vanessa Holyoak is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their sparse, set-like installations—bridging sculpture, photography, video, sound, performance, language, and scent—take up the fluid dimensions of hybrid identity through aesthetic explorations of memory, opacity, and diasporic ecologies. Holyoak holds a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from CalArts and a BA from Barnard College, and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Media & Culture at USC. They have attended interdisciplinary residencies at Millay Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Casa Lü, and Cove Park international artists' residency. Holyoak’s first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, was published by Sming Sming Books in 2023 (second edition 2025) and explores the longing for forestial darkness in an era of hyper-illumination.
Vanessa Holyoak’s body of work explores transpacific ecologies through evocations of iridescent phenomena such as oyster shells, moonlight, and bioluminescence, thinking through questions of diasporic memory by way of their orientations to the Pacific as a biracial artist raised in LA with roots in Hong Kong and Canada.
Three Pacifics #1, #2, and #3 (2026) presents these three affective oceanic orientations through the lens of memory. Resin-coated lightboxes enclosing oyster shells feature texts representing embodied memories from each of these three shores: Salt Spring Island (Canada), Sai Kung (Hong Kong), and the Pacific Palisades (LA). The writing is partially occluded by gently flowing cellophane sheets that reference both calligraphic scrolls and the shimmering movement of the sea.
On the sea glitters the silver star (銀色的星星在海面上閃閃發光) (2023 & 2026) is a sound installation comprised of a karaoke microphone and stand from which Holyoak’s maternal uncle’s voice emanates, singing the traditional Neapolitan sailor song “Santa Lucia” in a rich, if unsteady, baritone timbre—a kind of siren song emanating from an absent body across the Pacific.
In Under the oyster’s glow I did crumble (2026), a lightly- scented mound of oyster shells cast in porcelain radiate a nightlight, arranged haphazardly over a swath of iridescent faux silk chiffon. The work translates the self-illuminating quality of the shells through the use of unglazed porcelain, the fragile material recalling Holyoak’s mixed Chinese ancestry, the erosion brought on by time and weather, and the vulnerability of memory itself. The silvery fabric serves both as a stand-in for the sea and a metaphor for the fluid multiplicity of transpacific identity, infused with a longing for fragments of homes, times, and selves transposed on opposite shores.
Continental Drift #1, #2, and #3 (2026), includes a video and mirror installation and two hanging silk photo prints suspended from found driftwood, invoking the displacement inherent to acts of translation— whether cultural, linguistic, or image-based. These works mediate celestial bodies glimpsed from the coast—the moon and stars—across material and immaterial forms. A barely-moving image projected off of a mirror, pixelated and glitchy, evokes the strange doubling of experience produced in the instant of memory formation, while the silk prints, suspended spectrally in mid-air, drift as they would with the tides, caught between continents.
Ruoyi Shi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Drawinginspiration from ancient tales and rituals intertwined with language, habits, and societal norms, she blends humor and fiction to construct poetic narratives. In her works, Ruoyi invents figures, tools, myths, and memories, viewing them as fragments she collects to build an alternative reality. Her practice explores the intersection between nature and artificial existence, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication.
I recreated the barn house from the autorefractor vision test and used it as a dictionary for my vision testing system. It always appears peacefully at the end of the horizon, like a faraway dream.
In Chinese, the word for mouth(口) also stands for “exit.” The square shape inside the exit sign creates the word mouth together with the outline. However, the square bounces around but always fails to exit. The tiles reproduce pages of Chinese dictionaries around the character "口". Some are textbooks from the Ming and Qing dynasties, some are descriptions of "口" in early encyclopedias, some are comparisons of the same font in different countries and regions, and some are errors made by computer systems when detecting a foreign language other than English.
