Chloë Bass: Twice Seen

Alexander Gray Associates, New York, presents Chloë Bass: Twice Seen, the artist's first solo commercial exhibition. Debuting a 2024 multichannel video installation alongside new text-based prints and mirrored works, Bass's show is a multifaceted investigation into the nature of representation, positioning racial and cultural hybridity as foundational to American identity. 

Born in 1984 to a Trinidadian abstract artist and poet and a Jewish psychoanalyst, Bass embodies the cultural hybridity at the heart of her exhibition. Her immersive four-channel video installation we turn to time, recently acquired by the Walker Art Center, combines self-documented recordings from four families across the United States. As Bass writes, “... [the work] is the discovery and presentation of an archive … that quintessential form of nostalgic visual culture, the family home movie, featuring visibly mixed race, intergenerational families throughout the United States.” The footage, captured at various gatherings, brims with laughter, quotidian tasks, contemplative gazes, and telling silences. By transforming these private moments into public meditations on identity, Bass's installation challenges historical and contemporary representations of America that elide the country's inherent racial complexities.

Bass’s work recalls that of conceptual artists like Adrian Piper, Yoko Ono, and Lorraine O'Grady (1934–2024), who was both a mentor and friend. Like these artists, Bass’s installation traces the connection between representation, visibility, and power. Created against the backdrop of the United States’ fraught history—where anti-miscegenation laws criminalized interracial relationships for centuries—her videos present mixed-race family life as quintessentially American. “Throughout American history, the mixed-race body is usually presented either as a disaster … or as a kind of magic,” she writes. “… we turn to time resists the binaries of tragic/magic, choosing instead to engage with the idea of mixture as fundamentally American.” 

Bass's mirrors and letterpress prints, both titled PRETEXTS, further refine these ideas. The hand-silvered, obliquely engraved mirrors build on the artist's earlier Wayfinding installations, posing evocative statements to viewers that implicate them through reflection—incorporating them literally and figuratively into the exhibition's exploration of visibility. Meanwhile, Bass's prints describe scenes from a single 1960s-era archival home movie. Printed on salvaged offcuts from her mother’s print practice, these works use language and material to extend Bass's examination of how histories are recorded, emphasizing the gap between lived experience and representation. The texts for both the glass and letterpress works draw from the research and writing Bass did in preparation for we turn to time, including her 2018 lecture-performance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, THIS IS A FILM. 

Bass's work represents a profound exploration of identity and belonging. Through her video installation and text-based pieces, she dismantles conventional national narratives to offer a nuanced portrait of American selfhood—one that defies simple categorization. As Bass concludes, her art invites more comprehensive understandings of “…who we are, and who we could be.” 

The artist’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Wayfinding, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY (2024); #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America, co-presented by Art + Practice and California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Wayfinding, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Wayfinding, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2021); Wayfinding, St. Nicholas Park, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2019); and The Book of Everyday Instruction, Knockdown Center, Queens, NY (2018), among others. The artist’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Cantando Bajito: Chorus, Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, NY (2024); In These Truths, Albright-Knox Northland, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY (2022); Close to You, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2022); and Art on the Grid, Public Art Fund, New York (2020), among others. Bass’s performances have been spotlighted at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2023); COUNTERPUBLIC, St. Louis, MO (2019); Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin, Germany (2019); and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2018), among others. Her work is in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY and California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including New York University Future Imagination Fund Fellowship (2022); Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Arts and Culture Grant for SPCUNY (2021); and Art Matters Fellowship (2019), among others. Bass’s major projects often culminate in publications. Working with collaborators, she has released #sky #nofilter (2020); The Book of Everyday Instruction (2018); Art as Social Action (2018); Say Something, Jamie (2018); What is shared, what is offered (2017); and The Bureau of Self-Recognition (2013). The artist is an Associate Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she has co-directed Social Practice Queens (SPQ) with Dr. Gregory Sholette since 2016 and established Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY) in 2021. 

This exhibition is dedicated to the life and memory of Lorraine O'Grady, a friend and mentor to Chloë Bass, and a long-term artist with the Gallery.