Keep Left at the Fork opens with two hands maybe grasping for, maybe pulling away from one another. Jesus is watching from a wrist. As the title of the imposing work suggests, in this gaze are The Eyes of Texas (2022). The ambiguity of charged space between contact sets the tone for Chloe Chiasson’s solo museum debut at Dallas Contemporary; here, enormity and iconography suggest how home and history are constantly rejecting us and beckoning us back. Through a grouping of nine large-scale mixed-media paintings and sculptures, the artist succeeds in imbuing queer expression into scenes of Americana.
A trope of Texas poetics is the hometown in the rearview mirror. Chiasson leans into this and invites us to glance back. Cars and their mirrors abound in the exhibition, an intentional recurrence for Chiasson. Even the gallery space nods to an open road, as Keep Left unfolds down one long, expansive corridor. For the artist (originally from Port Neches, Texas), the car presents itself as more than a metaphor, as documentation of what a queer space can look like in a Southern enclave. The car offers a rare form of privacy, and therefore safety, from judging eyes.
While so much of the exhibition nods to a more liberated suburbia, where figures are androgynous, casually close, and hauntingly familiar, recurring imagery of the automobile and its accoutrements remind us of the reality. Keep Left at the Fork (2023), a six-foot side mirror dripping with morning dew, suggests that despite some societal progress, many places still push us to skip town in the early hours with twilight at our backs. Chiasson’s mastery of material is especially clear in this work, as plexiglass and resin are manipulated to replicate condensation that feels so naturalistic the lowest droplets on the mirror seem but a moment away from succumbing to gravity. To look ahead into Keep Left at the Fork means to look behind, with the reminder “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”
The exhibit is a smorgasbord of material and technique: wood, foam, resin, metal, fabric, plastic, oil, acrylic, LEDs, and construction, sculpture, digital design, painting. Chiasson achieves something theatrical, as her multi-dimensional works are textured to replicate the bed of a truck, a chain-link fence, the stoop of a corner store and its neon sign glowing above. Much like life, we are enveloped in sensory details; we are immersed in the scenes, implicated in this queer utopia where tender expressions of intimacy are neither denounced nor amplified, but simply lived.
While there are clear visual thematics in Keep Left that speak to the queer American experience, it is Chiasson’s artistic practice that offers some of the most compelling commentary on gender roles in society and as a creator. The artist implements realist and surrealist painting, metallurgy, and woodworking in an attempt to reimagine the supposed feminine (domestic) and masculine (laborious) actions of our hands: “I think about how these ideas play together materialistically and metaphorically in my manipulation of mixed materials and ways of making. About what makes a ‘capable’ hand.”
Chiasson’s process also engages with archival research. The subjects of her figures, while sometimes inspired by people in her life, are often based on photographs she has come across in lesbian community haunts and historical recordings of queer life. “My use in referencing archival materials naturally lends itself to a sort of nostalgia that runs through the work,” Chiasson explained. “But it’s really more about honoring, and how this sense of nostalgia can operate in this present moment. My goal with my work is to present something familiar, but in the end propose a totally different legibility.”
The Corner Store (2023) is the most vivid example of how these varying forms of practice come together. The three-dimensional work extends both backward into the wall and outward into the gallery space, its painted figures sprawl across a storefront stoop, cans scattered onto the floor. Closer inspection reveals Chiasson’s attention in her world-building: the inserted store is adorned with a popcorn ceiling, found objects are manipulated to reflect regionally appropriate branding (such as the iconic Texas Shiners), and portraiture suggests diverging interests among the subjects. The center figure holds a Port Neches newspaper containing a collage of articles from the artist’s hometown: a Frankenstein of the community’s concerns over time.
The Corner Store’s Port Neches news serves as one of the more transparent political critiques in the show, presenting both innocuous and socially charged reports. The exhibition’s literature is not naive and acknowledges the current
heated atmosphere regarding LGBTQIA rights in America; its presentation in a Texas museum further contextualizes it within a state where book bans and legislation around LGBTQ youth have been on the rise.
While Chiasson’s themes can feel weighty given the nation’s current political landscape (especially deep in the heart of Texas), this exhibition is charged with a sense of discovery and nostalgic joy. Chiasson seems determined to engage our senses, to play with scale, to lean into the tchotchkes and mementos that are often cast aside as pedestrian but that inform our daily habits and personhood. In the exhibition’s center rests a mammoth set of car keys, Oh, The Places You’ll Go (2023). Its keychains seem innocuous enough until you unpack the coding of a carabiner, the implications of mace, and the sentiment love is love expressed through craft-store beading.
Keep Left at the Fork offers an inspiring entry point to grappling with one’s relationship to home, especially if one’s home feels at odds with their identity and dreams. What are we to do with an imperfect home? Do we leave, count our blessings as we cross state lines, shake our heads from a distance? Or do we stay, and grapple with thorny roots? Like any small town, there is a lot to unpack here if you dig a little deeper, stay a little longer.
