Chiffon Thomas

New Haven, CT

August 1- 31, 2020

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work directly contends with the body and how it can become a vessel of meaning. Exploring how the pictured, sculpted, or crafted body can personify certain subjectivities, dispositions, or moral temperaments I am able to contemplate wider issues of gender, sexuality, race, and identity.  I have been constructing installations and forms that hover between abstraction, figuration and corporeal sensations to create figures that live within what I call an “impossible body”.  Using material exploration as a vehicle to investigate human subjectivity I am able to merge found pillars, columns, window screens, and crates with flesh-colored body parts crafted out of leather and embroidery to create a sense of agency that bodies experience maneuvering between interpersonal and sociopolitical systems. Through the animism of these once-living materials, as well as the deliberate joining of forms, I seek to evoke an air of vulnerability through these impossible bodies. These figures and environments they inhabit are caught between physical and psychological states they conjure the burden, the precarity, and the intensity of upholding—families, communities, subcultures and selves. Although my work can seem like a state of perpetual entrapment under oppressive conditions, it is also about embodied resilience and adapted strength that surmounts them.  

BIO

Chiffon Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist working often in hand embroidery and found materials. Thomas  was born in 1991 in Chicago, IL and currently lives and works in Connecticut after completing the MFA at Yale University in the spring of 2020. They have since been exhibiting in varying showings and fairs around Chicago, New York, and Miami and will be participating in two group shows entitled “My Selves” at Kohn Gallery ,LA” and “I Want To Feel Alive Again” Lyles & King Gallery, NY in September 2020. Thomas has participated in artist and residency programs such as ACRE Residency in 2017 and  Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2018, and is currently anticipating an upcoming solo exhibition at Kohn Gallery, LA in the winter of 2021.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: http://www.chanelcthomas.com/

Instagram: @c.chronicles