Essay: Contextures, Faculty Exhibition. Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery. Georgetown College. Georgetown, Kentucky, 2005

"Stacey Chinn works with a variety of media, often juxtaposing materials in non-traditional ways. Works on view here combine stack laminate wood and aluminum, steel balls and woven fiber, artificial hair and an electric fan. The forms could certainly have been created in other media, but her choice of materials enables us to immediately recognize a grammar of surface texture that might be familiar. What is unfamiliar is the juxtaposition of these differing media.

As Chinn has stated, "my work combines the historical language of textile craft (such as weaving, knitting, sewing and feltmaking) with an extensive language of metalwork (from fabrication to casting)." Working with these materials, Chinn has demonstrated textural as well as technical virtuosity. It's a… is at once meticulous and random. A dozen steel half-spheres were welded together and polished profusely. The objects were equally spaced and installed horizontally. At this moment, they exist as cold, arbitrary objects-seemingly appearing as cast offs from a blacksmith that have been made clean, their impurities removed. If we consider the balls to have inherited an industrial or dirty lineage, their ancestry has yielded, instead, objects that have been restored, revived, and renewed by virtue of Chinn's purposeful endearment to the metallic sphere.

By adding pink and blue knitted caps to each of the steel balls, Chinn introduces a human aspect to this industrial lineup. Metallic cast-offs become gendered identities. In Jim, Vincent, Tawia, Catherine, Thomas, Paul, Beshiltheeni, Ling, Laquita, Demond and Abigail (hereafter called Jim, Vincent…), Chinn removes the prominence of gender by excluding the pink and blue beanies. In their stead are unbleached material caps used to warm newborns in delivery rooms across the greater Lexington area. The steel balls are spray painted in the following colors (with decreasing frequency): white, black, yellow, and red. Arranged in a circle, each of the eleven spheres serves as an ordinal on an imagined clock's face. Chinn commented that the balls were placed somewhat deliberately, and to the viewer, the connection to time of birth and the larger cosmos of time becomes apparent. The frequency of each color possibly suggests a parallel to the cultural mix of the immediate geographical area.

The color of each ball bears the burden of cultural difference through the selection of a lengthy title. Appended to the wall, the names provide a hint of race, gender, and class all at once. At first glance, these two installations appear to be odd arrangements of opposite materials. Upon closer view-paying attention to details such as color, number, title, and context-the works become interesting, challenging, and purposeful. Placing knitted baby beanies on each ball, Chinn invites the viewer to make an association with the objects. In these works she shifts the burden of understanding as the yoke for the viewer to bear.

Many of Chinn's forms evoke the naturalism of Emile Zola's fictions. In the Rougon-Macquart series, Zola catalogues an industrial era that featured humans who were strained, restrained, and categorically ravaged. While Zola argued heredity and environment pre-determined one's actions, determination is far from Chinn's hand. Rather, she erases any aspect of pre-determination in her work. Steel is not relegated to large, masculine, industrial luster (though visually they continue to shine) and take on, instead, the burdens of gender, race, and culture (It's a… and Jim, Vincent…)"

Dr. Juliee Decker
Assistant Professor, Art History 
Georgetown College