I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Art + Art History + Design and submit this statement as part of my application for tenure and promotion. Working across spatial-, object-, and time-based platforms, I produce projects that examine the role of images in the construction
of myth, illusion, power and desire. In addition to maintaining an active career with a national and international exhibition record, I teach five classes yearly, and have conducted extensive service and program-building activity since my arrival at the University of Washington in 2018.
RESEARCH
My research process is akin to collage, involving the re-framing and re-staging of existing material, splicing together content from art, popular culture, mythology, and history. Confronting the seductiveness of familiarity, my aim is to produce a double take; an invitation to re-consider. In excavating the past as a way to contemplate the present, I am reminded of how the novelist Hanya Yanagihara describes history as a loop, not a line. The work looks backward as a way to look forward, too.
Military Landscapes
I was born in a place that no longer exists; or rather, a place no longer designated on a map: Williams Air Force Base, in Arizona. After a childhood spent as a military brat, my art career began in the San Francisco Bay Area, amidst a coastline riddled with former military installations. As I worked to expose the messy intersections between military and civilian cultures, I had exhibition opportunities in sites the military has left behind. I taught graduate courses at Fort Mason, and my former studio sat atop the radiological waste of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Now, my current studio, in Seattle, is located at Sand Point, a former Naval Air Station.
![Detail: "Idée Fixe (Monument)," 2017]()
!["Living History/Performing Death," 2014-15. Series of performances in Richmond, Virginia asking American Civil War reenactors to "play dead" in gallery spaces adjacent to Monument Avenue.]()
Although the initial impulse to examine the military’s presence in civilian life was sparked by personal history, the broader intention is to confront the widespread normalization of militaristic values. My projects have considered topics such as the militarization of children, fashion, language, and entertainment; the military’s alteration of seemingly natural landscapes; the impact of militirization on gender norms; and the civilian consequences of war. This body of work began with the Fort Da (2007) photo series and continued with sculptural installations such as Prepared Position with Ventilation and Luminous Signal (2010) and A Working Theory of Architectural Desire (2015).
![Installation View (l-r): "Fort Da" and "Prepared Position with Ventilation and Luminous Signal," Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA]()
![Installation View: "A Working Theory of Architectural Desire," 2015; RedLine Center for the Arts, Denver, CO]()
![Detail: cement-dipped sheets, "A Working Theory of Architectural Desire"]()
Extending the (il)logic of the fort, Bug-Out-Location (2009) was a survivalist shelter commissioned by Southern Exposure in San Francisco as part of Bellwether, an inaugural exhibition that asked artists to “engage in multi-layered speculative projections on our ever shifting and uncertain future.” A synthesis of a Civil Defense Fallout shelter, militia safehouse, and bespoke homesteader cabin, the structure was designed for a single person, intentionally futile, and stockpiled with absurd materials. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker wrote, “Extending a line laid down by Andrea Zittel, Lynn has made a burlesque of the American individualist fantasy of ultimate personal independence. One wishes it were much further from the truth.”
Typical of my non-linear research process, a kaleidoscopic approach to learning about survivalist subcultures led to a long-term investigation of traps. My focus is how, as objects, traps allude to conditions of attention and enticement; they function because their target is either oblivious, or the attraction is too strong to resist.
!["Death Party no.001," 2011]()
![Installation view: "Blacklight Traps," 2017; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA. Intended as a critique, adjacent to the gallery displaying these works was a multi-gallery "Summer of Love" exhibition.]()
The traps were initially based on vernacular forms, such as Involuntary Sculptures (Death Parties) (2011), a series of homemade fruit fly traps, baited with alcohol and photographed to resemble slick advertising campaigns. This spurred the creation of a series of sculptures-as-traps, intended to point to the cultural ensnarement of the Western art historical canon. Writing about Trap no.001 (2011) in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Matt Sussman said, “The piece takes Minimalist sculpture’s classic forms (the cube) and materials (transparent plastic, wood) and, with its suggestive title and familiar arrangement, freights them with unexpected emotion and an implied narrative that has a decidedly unhappy ending.”
![Installation View: "Silver Equivalent," Philip J. Steele Gallery, Denver, CO]()
!["Coyote lure (after Beuys)," 2017; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA]()
![Installation View: "Trap no.001" (foreground); "Silver Equivalent" (middle); "A Demonstration" (background); de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA]()
Dangerous Women: The Temptress Archetype
!["Lot and his Daughters (after Cezanne)," 2016]()
!["Eve (after Michelangelo)," 2016]()
While an Artist-in-Residence at The Neon Museum, Las Vegas, I began After the Fall (2016), a series of large-scale proposals for neon signs. The drawings trace canonical artists’ portrayals of women who have “fallen” because of sexual knowledge or whose supposedly ruinous seductive power lures men into danger. In examining the archetype of the temptress, the works point to the implications of positioning women as traps — and men as victims — as well as artists’ complicity in perpetuating gendered stereotypes.
!["Siren no.001," 2016; silk fig leaf, 14k gold hook]()
!["Siren no.056," 2016; eyelashes, gold thread, 14k gold hook]()
As part of my investigation into the representation of the temptress and femme fatale, I started researching mythological Sirens, who make their first literary appearance in Homer’s Odyssey. Dr. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the epic became an important guidepost for this body of work. I investigated the transmutation of the Siren in popular culture, tracing how far they have veered from their initial description in The Odyssey — where they exist only as a voice and are never physically described — to their contemporary conflation with (silent) mermaids. Reading Wilson’s work made me realize that the Sirens’ lure was not a temptation of the body — as 19th century painters led me to believe — but, rather, their threat was knowledge: they claim to know everything about the War in Troy, and from their song, can tell the perspective of suffering, from both sides of the conflict. To press forward, the sailors plug their ears with wax, saved by willful ignorance.
Alternative Contexts/Public Projects
During the early days of the pandemic, as galleries were shuttered across the globe, the ability to share my videos in alternative contexts — projected outdoors on the sides of buildings, splayed across digital billboards, and curated into online screenings — allowed me to remain active as an artist and connect with new audiences. This galvanized my desire to recenter video in my work, in combination with a commitment to producing projects that can be experienced outside of traditional gallery contexts.
![Installation View: "The Siren," UNTITLED ART, Miami Beach, FL]()
![Installation View: "The Siren," SFAI Tower, San Francisco, CA]()
In late 2019, I was commissioned by the Office of Arts & Culture in partnership with Seattle Public Utilities to produce a large-scale public artwork alongside the Burke-Gilman trail in Seattle. Installation was planned for spring of 2020, but experienced significant delays. During that time, the experience of witnessing the pandemic, social uprisings, a Capitol insurrection, and wildfires that turned the sky orange caused me to rethink my initial approach to the project, and I wanted to make something that more acutely framed the current moment. The result was WINE DARK SEE (2021), a non-linear sequence of panels that that spans 120 feet and uses The Odyssey as a way to grapple with the struggle to return home (particularly when “home” may no longer exist).
Subversive Florals
My most recent video installation, Time Kills (2023), builds on previous projects that employ floral motifs in the service of subversive aims (e.g. Memorial Bouquet [2016], Not Seeing is a Flower [2017], and Inertia Studies [2020-22]). Inviting critical reflection on the still life genre, these works start with a confrontation of how underlying the veneer of 17th century Dutch paintings — and their excessive depiction of foreign commodities — is a history of aggressive colonial agendas, the legacy of which remain felt today.
![Installation View: "Not Seeing is a Flower," 2017; San Diego International Airport. Each flower in the composition has a relationship to countries affected by the travel bans.]()
!["Memorial Bouquet," 2016; San Francisco War Memorial Building. Each flower represents nations that have been sites of US military operations and conflicts.]()
The sound for Time Kills was produced in collaboration with the Seattle-based duo Till the Teeth, comprised of Sandesh Nagaraj and Dr. Jonathan Rodriguez, who I met through the University of Washington’s School of Music. The resulting soundscape is driving and percussive, oriented spatially through multiple channels of speakers in the gallery to create an immersive sonic environment.
Time Kills, like all my work, is an act of translation, an accumulation of distortions that impact the reading of the original. My goal is to thwart expectations, raise questions about assumed rules, and touch on themes of imperfection and failure. The work asks its audience to consider the experience and perception of time, the politics and poetics of repetition, and how remembrance of the past impacts the present — and future.
![Production Still: "Time Kills," 2023]()
Work-in-Progress/Future Plans
I am currently an Artist Fellow with Black Cube, a non-profit museum that produces site-specific contemporary art in the public sphere. This 18-month fellowship will enable the production of an ambitious, new, site-specific project and I am honored to be in the company of recent fellows such as Lauren Halsey, Marguerite Humeau, Gabriel Rico, Adam Milner and Julie Beña. Simultaneously, I will begin work on my first narrative short film, Crocodile Tears, funded by a Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grant. The film, set in Florida, will explore the atmospheric conventions of Film Noir while complicating the form’s infamous archetype of the femme fatale through an examination of contemporary forms of deception.
In my current position as Chair of Interdisciplinary Visual Art (IVA) at UW, and in my previous role at Stanford, I have spent considerable time wrestling with what it means to lead an interdisciplinary program within the broader context of a research university. Specifically, in an environment structured around specialization, how is it possible to forge connections across different — and sometimes incommensurable — ways of knowing? What is at stake to take the position of the inter or between?
I teach courses at all levels within the Division of Art at UW, from intro classes in IVA to interdisciplinary Graduate Seminars, and sit on graduate committees in other units including Dance. Since arriving in 2018, I have worked closely with Art Advising to develop course pathways, and successfully added ten new courses to the undergraduate curriculum. Outside of the School of Art+Art History+Design, I developed a successful Mellon Foundation-funded course for non-art majors and am currently in conversation with faculty from Art History, Design, Drama, and Dance to explore possibilities for developing additional cross-listed courses.
In 2019, I received a Wycoff Milliman grant and arranged a trip to San Francisco for School of Art MFA students, where they installed a joint exhibition at Fort Mason with their peers from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Noticing equipment and facilities needs, I advocated for a renovation project that resulted in a new installation space on the second floor of the Art building for IVA students, and co-sponsored an STF grant that purchased $135,000 of video, sound, and camera equipment.
The results of my work in teaching are evident in student outcomes. As an example, Tiffany-Ashton Gatsby, who I mentored closely over a two-year period, was one of only two University of Washington undergraduates awarded a 2022 President’s Medal — a first for the School of Art+Art History+Design. Another student, Han Eckelberg, was granted a permanent art installation at the Odegaard Undergraduate Library after developing a prototype in my class. Across the board, IVA student work and the general atmosphere has improved, with increased numbers of IVA students applying to, and being accepted by, graduate programs and winning competitive scholarships.
I have made significant service contributions to the institution and broader community, which includes performing various leadership roles —Interim Chair, Co-Chair, and now Chair — for Interdisciplinary Visual Art, the largest program within the School of Art. As Chair, my duties include hiring and supporting visiting faculty; overseeing budgets; curriculum development; course scheduling; working with IVA Instructional Technicians; equipment and facilities planning; and participating in larger strategic meetings within the School of Art.
I am proud of my record hiring new faculty to teach in the Interdisciplinary Visual Art program, and recruited and supported the visiting faculty appointments of dynamic artists such as Sofía Córdova, nkiruka oparah, Chari Glogovac-Smith, Natalie Krick, Midori Hirose, and Izidora LETHE. As part of my recruitment efforts, I wrote and was awarded two Native Knowledge Grants, sponsored by the Center for American Indian & Indigenous Studies. This funding allowed the opportunity to hire the poet Arianne True (Choctaw/Chickasaw), and multimedia artist Lena Tseabbe Wright (Paiute/Yurok) to teach innovative courses that crossed disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
Throughout my time at UW, I have promoted cross-campus partnerships to support student learning and faculty research, which includes building bridges between the School of Art and the Department of Dance, School of Drama, College of Built Environments, and the Center for American Indian & Indigenous Studies. I am currently a key organizer for the Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster (MPRC), which was recently awarded $19,286 from the Simpson Center to continue programming through 2023-24. Spearheaded by Jasmine Mahmoud, Assistant Professor in the School of Drama, the MPRC brings together artists and scholars from across the UW campuses to investigate embodied and minoritized knowledge production often excluded from academic archives (including Indigenous, Black, LatinX, Asian Diasporic, Queer, Trans, Differently-Abled, and Carceral). In November 2023, I look forward to hosting Paul Chan at UW for a multi-day visit after nominating him to be an endowed Walker Ames Lecturer. During the 2023-24 season, I am also co-curating a year-long cycle of exhibitions in the lower lobby area at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts, alongside my colleague in Painting+Drawing, Assistant Professor Sangram Majumdar.
At the community level, I have served on public art selection committees for major commissions, was a peer reviewer for CAA Art Journal Open, and served on the Port of Seattle Art Oversight Committee, which sets art policy and provides overall guidance for the Port’s public art program, which includes the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Finally, I am honored to join the College of Arts & Sciences’ inaugural class of the Dean’s Academy Futurists during the 2023-24 academic year. As part of a small cohort of scholars, I will be in regular dialogue with Dean Dianne Harris and participate in a series of multi-day, off-site retreats with the goal of imagining new models for higher education.
RESEARCH
My research process is akin to collage, involving the re-framing and re-staging of existing material, splicing together content from art, popular culture, mythology, and history. Confronting the seductiveness of familiarity, my aim is to produce a double take; an invitation to re-consider. In excavating the past as a way to contemplate the present, I am reminded of how the novelist Hanya Yanagihara describes history as a loop, not a line. The work looks backward as a way to look forward, too.
Military Landscapes
I was born in a place that no longer exists; or rather, a place no longer designated on a map: Williams Air Force Base, in Arizona. After a childhood spent as a military brat, my art career began in the San Francisco Bay Area, amidst a coastline riddled with former military installations. As I worked to expose the messy intersections between military and civilian cultures, I had exhibition opportunities in sites the military has left behind. I taught graduate courses at Fort Mason, and my former studio sat atop the radiological waste of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Now, my current studio, in Seattle, is located at Sand Point, a former Naval Air Station.
Although the initial impulse to examine the military’s presence in civilian life was sparked by personal history, the broader intention is to confront the widespread normalization of militaristic values. My projects have considered topics such as the militarization of children, fashion, language, and entertainment; the military’s alteration of seemingly natural landscapes; the impact of militirization on gender norms; and the civilian consequences of war. This body of work began with the Fort Da (2007) photo series and continued with sculptural installations such as Prepared Position with Ventilation and Luminous Signal (2010) and A Working Theory of Architectural Desire (2015).
Extending the (il)logic of the fort, Bug-Out-Location (2009) was a survivalist shelter commissioned by Southern Exposure in San Francisco as part of Bellwether, an inaugural exhibition that asked artists to “engage in multi-layered speculative projections on our ever shifting and uncertain future.” A synthesis of a Civil Defense Fallout shelter, militia safehouse, and bespoke homesteader cabin, the structure was designed for a single person, intentionally futile, and stockpiled with absurd materials. Writing for the San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker wrote, “Extending a line laid down by Andrea Zittel, Lynn has made a burlesque of the American individualist fantasy of ultimate personal independence. One wishes it were much further from the truth.”
Typical of my non-linear research process, a kaleidoscopic approach to learning about survivalist subcultures led to a long-term investigation of traps. My focus is how, as objects, traps allude to conditions of attention and enticement; they function because their target is either oblivious, or the attraction is too strong to resist.
Dangerous Women: The Temptress Archetype
I discovered that a seductive woman is a trap more bitter than death. Her passion is a snare, and her soft hands are chains. Those who are pleasing to God will escape her, but sinners will be caught in her snare.
Ecclesiastes 7:26 NLT
While an Artist-in-Residence at The Neon Museum, Las Vegas, I began After the Fall (2016), a series of large-scale proposals for neon signs. The drawings trace canonical artists’ portrayals of women who have “fallen” because of sexual knowledge or whose supposedly ruinous seductive power lures men into danger. In examining the archetype of the temptress, the works point to the implications of positioning women as traps — and men as victims — as well as artists’ complicity in perpetuating gendered stereotypes.
As part of my investigation into the representation of the temptress and femme fatale, I started researching mythological Sirens, who make their first literary appearance in Homer’s Odyssey. Dr. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the epic became an important guidepost for this body of work. I investigated the transmutation of the Siren in popular culture, tracing how far they have veered from their initial description in The Odyssey — where they exist only as a voice and are never physically described — to their contemporary conflation with (silent) mermaids. Reading Wilson’s work made me realize that the Sirens’ lure was not a temptation of the body — as 19th century painters led me to believe — but, rather, their threat was knowledge: they claim to know everything about the War in Troy, and from their song, can tell the perspective of suffering, from both sides of the conflict. To press forward, the sailors plug their ears with wax, saved by willful ignorance.
Alternative Contexts/Public Projects
During the early days of the pandemic, as galleries were shuttered across the globe, the ability to share my videos in alternative contexts — projected outdoors on the sides of buildings, splayed across digital billboards, and curated into online screenings — allowed me to remain active as an artist and connect with new audiences. This galvanized my desire to recenter video in my work, in combination with a commitment to producing projects that can be experienced outside of traditional gallery contexts.
In late 2019, I was commissioned by the Office of Arts & Culture in partnership with Seattle Public Utilities to produce a large-scale public artwork alongside the Burke-Gilman trail in Seattle. Installation was planned for spring of 2020, but experienced significant delays. During that time, the experience of witnessing the pandemic, social uprisings, a Capitol insurrection, and wildfires that turned the sky orange caused me to rethink my initial approach to the project, and I wanted to make something that more acutely framed the current moment. The result was WINE DARK SEE (2021), a non-linear sequence of panels that that spans 120 feet and uses The Odyssey as a way to grapple with the struggle to return home (particularly when “home” may no longer exist).
Subversive Florals
My most recent video installation, Time Kills (2023), builds on previous projects that employ floral motifs in the service of subversive aims (e.g. Memorial Bouquet [2016], Not Seeing is a Flower [2017], and Inertia Studies [2020-22]). Inviting critical reflection on the still life genre, these works start with a confrontation of how underlying the veneer of 17th century Dutch paintings — and their excessive depiction of foreign commodities — is a history of aggressive colonial agendas, the legacy of which remain felt today.
Time Kills, like all my work, is an act of translation, an accumulation of distortions that impact the reading of the original. My goal is to thwart expectations, raise questions about assumed rules, and touch on themes of imperfection and failure. The work asks its audience to consider the experience and perception of time, the politics and poetics of repetition, and how remembrance of the past impacts the present — and future.
Work-in-Progress/Future Plans
I am currently an Artist Fellow with Black Cube, a non-profit museum that produces site-specific contemporary art in the public sphere. This 18-month fellowship will enable the production of an ambitious, new, site-specific project and I am honored to be in the company of recent fellows such as Lauren Halsey, Marguerite Humeau, Gabriel Rico, Adam Milner and Julie Beña. Simultaneously, I will begin work on my first narrative short film, Crocodile Tears, funded by a Royalty Research Fund (RRF) grant. The film, set in Florida, will explore the atmospheric conventions of Film Noir while complicating the form’s infamous archetype of the femme fatale through an examination of contemporary forms of deception.
TEACHING
In my current position as Chair of Interdisciplinary Visual Art (IVA) at UW, and in my previous role at Stanford, I have spent considerable time wrestling with what it means to lead an interdisciplinary program within the broader context of a research university. Specifically, in an environment structured around specialization, how is it possible to forge connections across different — and sometimes incommensurable — ways of knowing? What is at stake to take the position of the inter or between?
I teach courses at all levels within the Division of Art at UW, from intro classes in IVA to interdisciplinary Graduate Seminars, and sit on graduate committees in other units including Dance. Since arriving in 2018, I have worked closely with Art Advising to develop course pathways, and successfully added ten new courses to the undergraduate curriculum. Outside of the School of Art+Art History+Design, I developed a successful Mellon Foundation-funded course for non-art majors and am currently in conversation with faculty from Art History, Design, Drama, and Dance to explore possibilities for developing additional cross-listed courses.
In 2019, I received a Wycoff Milliman grant and arranged a trip to San Francisco for School of Art MFA students, where they installed a joint exhibition at Fort Mason with their peers from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Noticing equipment and facilities needs, I advocated for a renovation project that resulted in a new installation space on the second floor of the Art building for IVA students, and co-sponsored an STF grant that purchased $135,000 of video, sound, and camera equipment.
The results of my work in teaching are evident in student outcomes. As an example, Tiffany-Ashton Gatsby, who I mentored closely over a two-year period, was one of only two University of Washington undergraduates awarded a 2022 President’s Medal — a first for the School of Art+Art History+Design. Another student, Han Eckelberg, was granted a permanent art installation at the Odegaard Undergraduate Library after developing a prototype in my class. Across the board, IVA student work and the general atmosphere has improved, with increased numbers of IVA students applying to, and being accepted by, graduate programs and winning competitive scholarships.
SERVICE
I have made significant service contributions to the institution and broader community, which includes performing various leadership roles —Interim Chair, Co-Chair, and now Chair — for Interdisciplinary Visual Art, the largest program within the School of Art. As Chair, my duties include hiring and supporting visiting faculty; overseeing budgets; curriculum development; course scheduling; working with IVA Instructional Technicians; equipment and facilities planning; and participating in larger strategic meetings within the School of Art.
I am proud of my record hiring new faculty to teach in the Interdisciplinary Visual Art program, and recruited and supported the visiting faculty appointments of dynamic artists such as Sofía Córdova, nkiruka oparah, Chari Glogovac-Smith, Natalie Krick, Midori Hirose, and Izidora LETHE. As part of my recruitment efforts, I wrote and was awarded two Native Knowledge Grants, sponsored by the Center for American Indian & Indigenous Studies. This funding allowed the opportunity to hire the poet Arianne True (Choctaw/Chickasaw), and multimedia artist Lena Tseabbe Wright (Paiute/Yurok) to teach innovative courses that crossed disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
Throughout my time at UW, I have promoted cross-campus partnerships to support student learning and faculty research, which includes building bridges between the School of Art and the Department of Dance, School of Drama, College of Built Environments, and the Center for American Indian & Indigenous Studies. I am currently a key organizer for the Minoritarian Performance Research Cluster (MPRC), which was recently awarded $19,286 from the Simpson Center to continue programming through 2023-24. Spearheaded by Jasmine Mahmoud, Assistant Professor in the School of Drama, the MPRC brings together artists and scholars from across the UW campuses to investigate embodied and minoritized knowledge production often excluded from academic archives (including Indigenous, Black, LatinX, Asian Diasporic, Queer, Trans, Differently-Abled, and Carceral). In November 2023, I look forward to hosting Paul Chan at UW for a multi-day visit after nominating him to be an endowed Walker Ames Lecturer. During the 2023-24 season, I am also co-curating a year-long cycle of exhibitions in the lower lobby area at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts, alongside my colleague in Painting+Drawing, Assistant Professor Sangram Majumdar.
At the community level, I have served on public art selection committees for major commissions, was a peer reviewer for CAA Art Journal Open, and served on the Port of Seattle Art Oversight Committee, which sets art policy and provides overall guidance for the Port’s public art program, which includes the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Finally, I am honored to join the College of Arts & Sciences’ inaugural class of the Dean’s Academy Futurists during the 2023-24 academic year. As part of a small cohort of scholars, I will be in regular dialogue with Dean Dianne Harris and participate in a series of multi-day, off-site retreats with the goal of imagining new models for higher education.