Chloë Bass likes to view people, and our emotions are her medium.
She is part of a descent of artists on fields that critically explore race and social performance, so that simplistic stories are dissected – by writer Danzy Senna To the deceased conceptual artist Lorraine O’grady. Bass’s practice to use text with assembly, mirrors and urban signage embodies what she has described As ’emotional wayfinding’, the semiotics of our emotional life and the social and political understreams that form them, at the level of individual neural paths and latticed networks of families and strangers. Bass requires that we delay and sit with ourselves, an increasingly difficult task in 2025. What feelings, moods and memories can evoke words? Which emotional traces are lingering when you remove those words?
These questions are bubbling at the surface of TwiceBass’s Solo exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, dedicated to O’grady itself. Here, Bass Plumbs Life Mixed Race Life and the puzzles of visibility, double consciousness and perception by two works: “We turn to time” (2024), a multi-channel video installation; and “pretenses” (2025), three mirrors engraved by text hung about descriptions of poetic scenes. As she said Hyperallergic In 2023, her practice was partially rooted in a joint attempt to ‘reach people emotionally where they are’. In TwiceShe walks the path next to us.
If you’ve been Tiktok for the past four years, you’ve seen the “mixed girl poetry” skits and over-nijverige ” ever I think I am Indian ”videos. These annoying and, more importantly, self-exoting, additive approaches of art with mixed race and political expression occurred when I stepped in it Twice. The two works to see such long -standing myths of black people with mixed race as’tragic“Whether saccharin, often apolitical romanticiations of intermediate intermediate intermediate. Bass’s artistic practice, based on her own background as the only child of a Trinidadian artist and poet and a Jewish psychoanalyst and translator, that is certainly surviving and will certainly survive the ticked tap clochés.
The three engraved elongated mirrors in “pretenses” immediately moved me in with their painful truth: “Very fast, other people can become our souvenirs.” Reading this sentence unleashes a stream of historical and contemporary wounds and calls on centuries -long practice to make a person in one thing, dehumanized for slavery and collection. The next mirror pushes us to the next step: “Unobtrusive things will happen, specially made by their catch.”
Each word is clearly carefully chosen and registered. I couldn’t help it, but I think of recent campaigns for Western museums to repatriate artworks and human remains, and last month’s victory in her legal battle with Harvard University to win day -to -slave to slave ancestors, Papa Renty and his daughter Delia. “Capture” also feels like a deliberate reference to the same forms of violence and cooperative That bass is interested in, while he implies photography and visual art in their commitment – and even us, the viewers who are trapped in the frame of the mirror, even if it was only for a moment or two.
The message on the third mirror points to the future: “The accumulation of small moments builds up the biggest respect of all.” On the opposite wall, a set of six sheets of bass that is stored from her mother’s printing process carries book texts, who tells a scene from a film that we cannot see: a home video from the 60s of family members dancing.
This is not a series of confirmations or feel-good platitudes. I took it as a challenge from the artist. She dares – especially those among us from multiracial backgrounds – to ‘recording’ again, Pay attention to apparently unobtrusive things and refuse to change ourselves and each other into novelties.
Nothing in “We Duck to Time” is particularly remarkable. The video installation, in the next and last room, shows clips of meals and daily life filmed by American families with mixed race and projected on four white walls. Parents and children who hang out for a meal, cousins turn off a performance of “Let It Go” FrozenGrandparents evaluate the cooking skills of the next generation. The home film of every family flickers to life, cuts to black and is washed on a different wall. It is a cacophony of tender scenes that we may not expect to encounter in a gallery, but it inevitably has my own memories of meetings, loved ones, shared meals and playing inflamed. It is crucial that it is not possible to view each scene. Some moments glide through your fingers such as sand, but those you catch are precious.
Chloë -Bas: Seen twice Continue at Alexander Gray Associates (384 Broadway, Tribeca, Manhattan) until July 26. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
