Chloë Bass likes to people watch, and our emotions are her medium.
She’s part of a lineage of artists across fields who critically explore race and social performance, eschewing simplistic narratives — from writer Danzy Senna to the late conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. Bass’s practice of using text with assemblage, mirrors, and urban signage embodies what she has described as “emotional wayfinding,” the semiotics of our emotional lives and the social and political undercurrents that shape them, on the level of individual neural pathways and latticed networks of families and strangers. Bass requires us to slow down and sit with ourselves, an increasingly difficult task in 2025. What feelings, moods, and memories can words conjure? What emotional traces linger when you take those words away?
These questions bubble up to the surface of Twice Seen, Bass’s solo exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, dedicated to O’Grady herself. Here, Bass plumbs mixed-race life and the puzzles of visibility, double consciousness, and perception through two works: “we turn to time” (2024), a multi-channel video installation; and “PRETEXTS” (2025), three text-engraved mirrors hung across from descriptions of poetic scenes. As she told Hyperallergic in 2023, her practice is partially rooted in a concerted effort to “emotionally reach people where they’re at.” In Twice Seen, she walks the path alongside us.
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Read the full article at hyperallergic.com
