We Turn To Time
Alexander Gray Associates
June 13 - July 26, 2025.
Chloë Bass’s we turn to time (2024), on view at Alexander Gray Associates until July 26, is a powerful four-channel video installation exploring intimacy and racial mixture in contemporary America. Part of her larger project Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place, the work counters reductive narratives of mixed-race families with quiet, politically charged portraits of everyday life.
Filming four families across Minneapolis, New York, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, Bass focuses on ordinary moments—cooking, cutting cake, sitting in silence—eschewing linear narrative in favor of simultaneity. Viewers must constantly choose where to look, becoming active participants in shaping meaning.
The installation includes mirrored text panels from her ongoing #PRETEXTS series, such as “very quickly, other people can become our souvenirs,” confronting viewers with the politics of watching and being watched. Using handheld, unslick visuals, Bass resists the polish of institutional art, favoring emotional authenticity.
Drawing on a legacy that includes Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems, Bass reframes hybridity as foundational, not marginal. we turn to time is a meditative, morally urgent reflection on seeing, memory, and the power of quiet connection.
