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
LA Artcore | 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
I’m swollen with life.
I start to dissolve… my brain is bloated…
I’m a bad girl with divine intervention!
It’s the only thing some of us have left…
Let us have this fucking 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 even delusion.
Swollen with Life is a group exhibition curated by artist, Dominique Go, investigating the distractions we conjure 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. Through various mediums, artists showcase the deluded fantasies, sick fixations, and sparkling escapism used as coping mechanisms to soften everyday absurdity that people use as tactics of survival for the human spirit. Together the artworks confront topics such as belief, numbness, alternate possibility, and purpose.
Artist Bios
Jiayun Chen is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the poetics and humor found in mistranslations, investigating the aesthetics of failure in cross-cultural encounters. Having divided her time equally between China and America, Chen's work is distinctly influenced by her experience navigating these two cultures. Language is a vessel of communication that fascinates her deeply, which she explores through installation, ceramics, painting, and drawing. She is particularly intrigued by the nuances of mistranslations that arise in attempts to bridge these two worlds. Rather than seeing translation as a seamless process, she embraces the barriers and errors, viewing them as gateways to new linguistic and semiotic expressions.
In previous projects, she explored themes like Chinese character tattoos on Western bodies and misinterpreted English phrases on Asian apparel. Her solo exhibition Scattered All Over the Earth at USC Roski used mistranslation to critique language power dynamics and imagine communication beyond grammar. Her recent solo show tat skin slip tongue at Orlando furthers the concept of mistranslation, but with AI-generated images, emphasizing that while these images capture the appearance of both Chinese and Western scripts, they are inherently devoid of meaning.
Chen holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA from USC Roski School of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and art spaces such as Charlie James Gallery, Human Resources, Hong Museum, and FOCA (Fellows of Contemporary Art).
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.
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. Her previous series of works was interested in the mistranslations of love - such as, proposing to the oldest palm tree in LA for green card status. More recently, her artwork explores wishes, and the border between real/fantasy, fate/freedom.
Her work has been included in group exhibitions in non-profit and artist-run spaces such as Arroyo Arts Collective / Avenue 50, Coaxial Arts Foundation, LA Artcore, The Build Big Foundation, The Front Arte & Cultura, and From the Desk of Lucy Bull.
Carolina Hicks is a Colombian-American artist, writer, and musician born and raised in Los Angeles. What began as zine-making practice in 2011, spilled into her current practice: a nexus of illustration, publishing, writing, painting, design, sculpture, video, animation, sound, performance, and social engagement.
The work is a response to the overwhelming, grief-stricken enmeshment between and amongst the ecological, socio-political, cultural, mental, and identity crises occurring on Earth (from private to planetary in scale); a fibrous web of existential, emotional, and ontological inquiry.
In recent years, she’s participated in residencies at CalArts, Otis College of Art and Design, Malmö University, and most recently with the collective Loves Remedies in participation with ArtCenter Downtown. She holds a BA in anthropology from San Francisco State University and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.
Vanessa Holyoak is a Franco-Asian American interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Their intermedial installation practice—bridging photography, sculpture, video, performance, language, and scent—raises questions about diasporic and ecological loss, taking up the fluid dimensions of hybrid identity through aesthetic explorations of memory, opacity, and cultural translation. Through a play of occlusion and revelation, their sparse sculptural tableaux orchestrate a state of enhanced sensoriality, blurring fixed identity positions by cultivating slow temporalities and a heightened sensitivity to the body's haptic resources. Their work seeks to create conditions of indeterminacy, embracing darkness and ambiguity to elude colonial-capitalist ideologies of capture. Through dreamlike juxtapositions of objects, moving and still images, sound, and scent articulated through a speculative lens, Holyoak's installations engage themes such as darkness and nocturnality, media and memory, queer and diasporic time, and the rich phenomenology of embodied experience. Their current body of work explores transpacific ecologies through evocations of iridescent phenomena such as oyster shells, moonlight, and bioluminesce, thinking through questions of diasporic memory by way of their orientations to the Pacific.
Holyoak is a PhD candidate in Comparative Media & Culture at the University of Southern California, where they also received the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate. They hold a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA in French Literature, Translation, and Philosophy from Barnard College of Columbia University. Select exhibitions include Casa Lü in Mexico City, The Center for Book Arts, Columbia University, and Beyond Studios in New York/Brooklyn, DC Arts Studios in Washington, DC, CCA PLAySPACE in San Francisco, and AU PAIR, CalArts, Commons, Eastside International, Hauser & Wirth/ICA LA, Harkawik, Human Resources, the Bendix Building (JOAN/Ste. 534/Track 16 Gallery), LA Artcore, Lauren Powell Projects/The Art Room, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Monte Vista Projects, New Arts Foundation, Nomad Pavilion, Plot 田, The REEF, and USC in Los Angeles. Holyoak's work has been supported by multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. They have attended residencies at Cove Park international artists' residency, Casa Lü, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Forthcoming residencies include Millay Arts and Hypatia-in-the-Woods.
Ruoyi Shi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Drawing inspiration 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.
Born and raised in Nanjing, China, Ruoyi received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2021 and her BFA in Sculpture from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2019. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and galleries including GOBI Los Angeles, Make Room Los Angeles, Phase Gallery, Human Resources Los Angeles, Tin Flats, Beijing Times Art Museum, and the National Art Museum of China. She has participated in numerous residency programs, including Millay Arts, Anderson Ranch, ACRE Residency, the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, (M)Art, the Welcome Project by Wave Pool, the REEF Residency, and Residency 108.
