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Jessi Ali Lin (University of Pennsylvania) is a recipient of the 2020 Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.

Jessi Ali Lin is an artist based in Philadelphia. Her practice exploits the notion of positionality both in terms of physical position and the multivalence of identity. Drawing from feminist history, Minimalism and performance art, she examines her own positionality as a woman and her experience moving between the U.S. and Taiwan, which requires code switching to perform in her newly adopted systems. By obliquely referencing these personal experiences in sculpture, performance, and video, Lin points to the relationship between the performance of identity, its fragmented nature, and the way it confines us in our assigned categories.

Video projections are often mapped out precisely to sculptural components of her work and vice versa. In Untitled, Still Life Construction on See Saw I, she points to the instability of images in relation to identity by creating a video performance that considers each side of the seesaw as a surface to construct still life images. By fracturing the projected image physically and digitally, the work challenges the authority of the one-point perspective and singular narratives while implicating the viewers, pointing to the positionality of their bodies and the space they occupy, both within the exhibition space and in the larger world.