You’re in a box, and the box is made of glass. The glass constricts you, keeps the anxiety close to you. Your flesh is twisted into itself, and you are drowning in the heat of your own breath. With no room for movement, you surrender. You surrender to constriction, to suffocation. The panic owns you, and in this moment of being owned, you finally experience absolute freedom.  

For Boxes, Bowls, Belljars – her third solo exhibit for Pablo/Post – Tin Garcia unshackles the common imagery associated with bondage. Boxes, Bowls, Belljars does away with the leather, chains, gags, and whips. Instead, the paintings in this exhibit explore submission though confinement and suffocation in the realm of domesticity.  

Figures are stuffed into invisible glass boxes, their limbs, skin, and hair pressing against all sides. Tin wanted to examine anxiety-inducing situations and the sense of claustrophiliac freedom that submission ultimately provides– or as the artist puts it, “applying pressure to cleanse.”

The works also echo the anxiety of the creative process. Serville to these canvases, Tin submitted herself to the demands of the paintings, and the promise of a greater emotional release.