Tina Lam
I am a visual artist born in Montreal, Canada who is currently completing an MFA in creative visual arts at Cornell University after having earned a BFA in studio arts (Concordia University) and a PhD in chemistry (McGill University). I have exhibited in solo and group shows in the US and Canada and received numerous funding for my work including grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Quebec Council for the arts and letters.
My work is a meditation on forces; how they are perceived, inferred, embodied, defined, transformed and transformative. I examine their interplay at the nexus of the natural, the human-made and the primordial. I am iintrigued by how these enigmatic forces, whether they be natural, social, ideological, spiritual, or of unknown origin, exert sway over matter and beings alike despite often being invisible and intangible. I dialogue with these unknowns by energetically tampering with materials originating from biomass (paper and wood), minerals and ores (steel, rocks, aluminum and copper) through manual interventions via torsion, pressure, layering, heat, balancing and mark-making.
My work is nourished by my personal experiences and philosophical, literary and scientific musings. Growing up uprooted at the confluence of various cultures and modes of thinking, I create paintings, sculptures and installations in which the traditional, the crafts, the industrial, the scientific, the urban and the natural poetically commingle, reflecting a yearning to harmonize the disparate cultural, ideological and aesthetic heritages which inhabit my being. Through materiality, I explore concepts of transformation, cosmology, identity, perception, affect, knowledge, and meaning.
