Sharper Tools for Unripe Fruit

Sharper Tools for Unripe Fruit underscores the awkwardness of monumentality and its precarious taste for nostalgia. The unfinished business of commemoration takes the form of hand-embroidered text, choosing the anti-spectacular visual elements of watermarks and default fonts. Inspired by traditional printmaking processes, the PROOF series attempts to hold the desire for archival presence with the problems of its structure. In these interrupted photographs, the various subjects are unable–and unwilling–to be claimed. The pieces borrow the institutional pen of templates, signage, and forms, while displacing their functions through distrustful lived experiences.

Lan Florence Yee is a visual artist and serial collaborator based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. They collect text in underappreciated places and ferment it until it is too suspicious to ignore. Florence’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), the Art Gallery of Ontario (2020), the Textile Museum of Canada (2020), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), and many others. Along with Arezu Salamzadeh, they co-founded the Chinatown Biennial in 2020. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U.