A sculptor and revisionist historian, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman uses a plethora of sculptural materials, from glass to ready-mades, to achieve her conceptual ends. The Los Angeles–based artist is known for her vibrant, sometimes eerie objects that conjure otherworldly glimpses into buried colonial histories and narratives of exploitation from our rapidly globalizing world—a saddle might gesture at the absurdity of a Eurocentric myth that Mesoamericans mistook Spanish conquistadors for powerful centaurs, for instance. As she continues to expand her practice and find new research topics, Bermúdez-Silverman will participate in a group exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, which opens in May. For this issue’s “Peer Review,” she discusses the work of artist Candice Lin.

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Repository I: Mother, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

A while back, an ex-boyfriend took me to a ­lecture that Candice Lin gave at the Hammer ­Museum in which she discussed her work. I had never heard of Candice but I left extremely inspired and pleasantly surprised by the number of similarities that I identified between the topics in her lecture and things that I had been studying. She spoke about obscure subjects that I had really been researching on my own—casta paintings and the tobacco ­mosaic virus, among others—so I was excited to see that someone else was interested in those same ideas.

This past fall, I went to see Candice’s show ^­“Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory” at Canal ­Projects in New York. The show was a great use of various ­materials, and it was impressive to have all of these mediums, created by the same artist, speak with equal volume in a single exhibition. Candice has mastered video, animation, sound installation, written text, ceramic and textile work. With the way these things came together, the show felt like you were in the factory that is the artist’s brain. Specifically, I was really captivated by Candice’s use of animation and written text to narrate the sex ­demon’s life. She crafts fictional tales that ­seamlessly intertwine with diverse references from actual ­histories. I admire the way she skillfully constructs an immersive ­experience, all the while presenting a captivating fictional narrative that comes to life on small screens.

Further, I love her work because it feels very much related to my conceptual practice, but also extremely different. We’re thinking about a lot of the same things—colonial histories of global trade, globalized power structures and production chains—and it seems like we’re often overlapping in our interests. Our approaches and outcomes are very different, though. The similarities and differences between Candice’s work and my own present an interesting study in how analogous ideas can manifest in very different ways.  — As told to Christie Hayden