Almine Rech is to present the New York premiere of Chloe Wise’s Told A Vision, on December 15th, 2023 at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.
The film will continue to be on view and open to the public through Saturday, December 16th, 2023 from 12 pm to 8 pm. Artist Chloe Wise’s latest work Told A Vision, a multimedia installation originally created for Parcours, Art Basel, replicates the sensation of channel surfing at the mercy of some unknown remote control holder.
Fragments of commercials, despite their uncanny familiarity and authoritative language, advertise nothing in particular. These scenes evoke empty promises, tautologically promoting the idea of consumerism itself. As the film progresses, the messages become distorted, and language devolves into meaninglessness, approximating the incoherence of overheard snippets of conversation in a crowd.
In writing these fragments, Wise takes her cues from advertising, consumer and popular culture, news and TV, resulting in a tone that gestures towards satire, without clarifying their underlying intention. The instantly recognizable contents of each short film are obfuscated through Wise’s rearrangement,
creating a whole that remains aware of the sum of its parts. Through this project, Wise aims to provoke critical thought about the ways in which consumer culture and technology undergird our daily lives, shaping our priorities, desires, and consequently our value systems.
Her previous work has explored themes of consumerism and identity in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, painting, and video. Told A Vision both questions and revels in the ubiquitousness of advertising, and considers how, and who, shapes our perception of reality and our place within it. Told A Vision is a timely and thought provoking work that encourages viewers to reflect on their relationship with consumerism and the ways in which it shapes our values and priorities.
Almine Rech Brussels will present a solo exhibition of Chloe Wise’s new body of work in 2024.
Chloe Wise, ‘Told a Vision’ New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W 64th Street, New York, US
December 15th – 16th, 2023
About the artist
Chloe Wise (b. 1990 Montreal, Canada) lives and works in New York. Widely recognized for her multidisciplinary approach, Wise seamlessly navigates the realms of painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Her artistic practice explores the historical nuances inherent in portraiture, delving into the multiple channels that lead to the construction of a Self. Whether through portraits of friends, meticulously painted sculptures of food appearing across her installations, or videos that pointedly address their viewers, Wise engages the idea of hyperreality, where the boundary between
reality and representation becomes blurred.
Oscillating between social commentary and satirical wit, Wise scrutinizes the contemporary landscape, dissecting social taboos and unraveling the fetishization of commodities. In navigating these mediums, Wise pays particular attention to how social relations among people have become mediated by images and, by the same coin how relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people.
Since 2015, advertising, fashion, taboo, and media – have served as rich material for audiovisual works that capture how consumptive habits are built around these structures. Injected with parody and derision, Wise rearranges instantly recognizable tropes of consumer culture with quick turns of phrase to create a whole that remains aware of the sum of its parts.
