Boy in Night Grass

In his work, Chase explores sexuality in terms of his fluid understanding of gender and identity. He employs recognizable symbols associated with ideas of masculinity and femininity. He represents the body as a mutable force shaped by desires that cannot be fixed to binary ideas. Chase explores the mutable forces of human sexuality, orientation, gender, and self-identification in this work. They employ recognizable symbols associated with ideas of masculinity, such as the football, and femininity, such as the flowers. The figure’s black, mask-like face simultaneously evokes and challenges a history of racial stereotyping, and the Nike-branded sneakers denote the commercialization of identity in both sports and fashion.   

Chase is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, video, sound, and sculpture to depict queer Black love and community. Born and raised in Philadelphia, they received an associate of arts from the Community College of Philadelphia, a BFA from the University of the Arts, and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). They have exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Woodmere, PAFA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Rubell Museum, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and the Pond Society in Shanghai. Chase is represented by Company Gallery in New York.

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