The Ranch to open Natural Causes, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chloe Wise in the West Barn Side Galleries. Large-scale paintings accompanying the exhibition will inaugurate the opening of the gallery’s new venue at Gosman’s dock.
In Natural Causes, comprised primarily of paintings of figures donning animal masks, the temptation of fantasy comingles with the desire for adolescent purity. A nod to our primal instincts, dressing up as an animal is a ritual undertaken at designated holidays or incorporated into erotic roleplaying. Addressing this phenomenon, Wise intersperses an assortment of portraits of her adult friends, nude but for the masks (camp naivete tinged with self-awareness). For the children’s portraits, the artist borrows impish faces from stock photos found on a Halloween website—joining ambiguous, detached reference with the homespun and intimate. Immediately, these paintings enter Bataille’s paradox of base materialism: they grasp for decency with the same hand that coaxes debauchery.
Wise examines what it means to take seriously these flimsy attempts at self-transformation. To be sure, there is much at stake in this gesture: temporary anonymity, compensatory escapism, diversion. On the other side of the coin, there skulks willing debasement, body dysmorphia, sexual humiliation. But what these portraits certainly enact is the suspension of disbelief—literalizing this concept by presenting each as a floating head unmoored from both body and background. Barely even covering the nose, these feeble attempts at animi nevertheless satisfy the societal drive to categorize and compartmentalize.
By extension, visual disguise liberates repressed urges and allows a socially acceptable pretext for misbehavior broadly construed. Even while the artist directs us to the Foucauldian politics of play as controlled intervention, she also reminds that these rituals pry open the irrational and ecstatic. Ultimately, these portraits pull apart the mechanisms that chasten play and the covenants that presuppose the seriousness of portraiture.
Chloe Wise: Natural Causes, The Ranch, West Barn | Side Galleries, July 22nd – August 10th, 2023
About the artist
Chloe Wise’s practice spans diverse media, including painting, sculpture, video and installation. Foregrounding an interest in the history of portraiture, Wise examines the multiple channels that lead to the construction of a Self, paying particular attention to the interweaving of consumption and image making. With a wry sense of humour, she nods to canonical tableaux, like Manet’s Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe, exploring the shared projected desires built around food and the female body. Meticulously hand painted casts of food serve as the base for the artist’s sculptural practice where strange assemblies, now frozen in sculpted plastic, toy with the presence and absence of unchangeability and perishability, fiction and reality. Advertising, fashion, taboo, multi-national brands—Wise looks to the consumptive habits built around these structures with parody and derision, underlying how the body is framed and becomes excessive in its manipulation of these sites. MORE
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