Chloe Chiasson

My practice explores themes of self-expression and queer identity. Figures inhabit environments reminiscent of my childhood in a small town in Texas, reimaged to both celebrate and include queer identities within this distinct cultural context. My ambition is to challenge my audience to consider a rewritten narrative: a queer South alive with symbology, autobiography, dissonances and resonances. A South that allows space for larger themes that reflect the varied theatre of queer life.
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Through painting and various supplementary media, I utilize the physical likeness of the body and people who came before me convey different versions of sex, gender, reverie, devastation, love, hope, and nostalgia. I recreate everyday objects and scenes to embody memory, space, the present, and the future. Referencing found photography from an oppressive lesbian history is used to distort and re-envision reality. Fragmentation serves not only as a method of deconstruction, but also as an additive process in which queer selfhood is malleable, ever- changing, tactile and connected. The mix of painting, carpentry, and craft honors the feminist focus of the late 60s and 70s on physical attributes and manipulation of materials determine not only form, color, and scale, but to a larger extent, content, in its rebellion against its historical male associations.
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Through figurative painting, sculpture, archival photography, and carpentry, I am creating imagined and re-imagined spaces, places, and figures where queer people might find a moment that feels like home, where they might feel seen, celebrated, and reminded that space and identity is never absolute or fixed, but constantly produced and reproduced in how it is all at once created and lived.

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