Hamptons, New York
Chloe Wise
Natural Causes
The RanchTo make an appointment, please visit: bit.ly/3v5i15d The Ranch is pleased to present Natural Causes, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Chloe Wise in the West Barn Side Galleries. 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.