Meet March’s Artists in Residence
Chloe Chiasson, Devin Johnson and Jenny Feal
This month’s residency is generously sponsored by Leslie and Michael Weissman.
Chloe Chiasson
Born in a conservative small town in Texas, Chloe Chiasson’s sculptural paintings explore sexuality and identity in environments like that of her childhood. Her depictions of queer love, friendship, and self-expression are contextualized into a world where mutability wouldn’t be necessary for survival, where freedom stretches to take on more meaning and that exchanges rigid social norms for hopeful, fluid possibility. Provided by intimate views into history as well as a personal lifetime, Chiasson’s large-scale worlds shine a light on radical love and acceptance, the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning that constitute queerness itself.
Chloe received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. While at NYAA, she concentrated in painting and was awarded the Belle Artes Residency and the Chubb Post-Graduate Fellowship. Chiasson has exhibited internationally in London, Germany, and Hong Kong. She has been featured in Artsy, New American Paintings, Artnet News, Juxtapoz, and Hyperallergic.
Devin Johnson
Devin B. Johnson approaches the canvas like a musician; you hear his work as much as you see it. His rhythm is architectural and expressive with a heavy textural backbeat. He’ll spray plaster on the substrate to pump up the bass through the subsequent layers. The paintings lie in a temporal space of bewilderment and undulation. Paint drips, pools, skips and gets pulled, almost like a time stretch or paused VCR stills. The paintings are between both a becoming and an undoing. Johnson paints from improvised, freestyle digital collages sourced from personal and historical imagery arranged into fictional, sentimental situations. Each portrait and tableau is a love song to these intimate, yet universally relatable experiences.
Born in Los Angeles, Johnson obtained his BA in Fine Arts from the California State University of Channel Islands and received a Masters of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute. In 2022, he was honored by the Artsy Vanguard. His work has been shown at Jeffrey Deitch, Nicodim Gallery, and at the ICA Los Angeles. Johnson lives and works in New York.
Jenny Feal
In Cuba, water is omnipresent, especially as a territorial frontier. But in Cuban artist Jenny Feal’s work, the island is more specifically incarnated by land. Water and clay, so present in her pieces, represent the relationship all these elements maintain, generating the tension that impregnates her work. Feal compares the material to a flexible, malleable materialization of thought, as work in clay can be interrupted, continued step by step, dried, or broken down. The combination of clay and water is more than just a material happening, it is a metaphor for life, with the intrinsic ambivalence that resides in the absence of life, being death. Philosophically, clay is a timeless material; it can be endlessly modeled and shaped; Feal considers it a noble material, thanks to which everything is possible.
Feal’s works have been exhibited at the Havana Biennial, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Villa Médicis in Rome, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the MAC Lyon during the Lyon Contemporary Art Biennial and at the Fondation Martell in Cognac. She was a finalist for the SAM Prize for Contemporary Art in France in 2021. Feal currently lives and works in Lyon, France.
