Glory Days

Glory Days, a new solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Chloe Chiasson, opens at Southern Guild New York on May 21, 2026.

Chiasson’s image-dense works are shaped by Queer subjectivity and the symbolic architectures of the American South. Operating between painting, carpentry, and sculptural fabrication, her compositions bring together figures, keepsakes, and culturally coded fragments into layered tableaux where intimacy, performance, and self-construction unfold in close relation.

Structured as an open keepsake box, Glory Days unfolds as a non-linear archive of images and private mementos. A plastic photo album is paired with an oversized friendship bracelet, suggesting coded intimacy or adolescent devotion. Photographs appear folded, cropped, or handled to the point of transformation. A trio of dissonant prize ribbons gestures toward social adaptation and emotional performance rather than achievement alone. Elsewhere, scratch-off tickets, bumper stickers, postcards, and pageantry memorabilia accumulate, carrying the emotional and symbolic weight of a distinctly Southern American visual culture.

For Chiasson, these materials function less as nostalgic artifacts than as evidence: traces of systems through which identity is shaped, signalled, and made visible. The works consider the ways ordinary objects come to carry desire, aspiration, shame, affection, projection, belonging, or expectation. What happens when Queer selfhood forms within these culturally scripted structures rather than outside of them? Here, memory operates less as subject than method – a framework through which gestures, performances, and social inheritances are examined and reassembled.

Extending outward into space through layered surfaces and constructed dimensions, the works shift and recompose as the viewer moves around them. Bodies, symbols, and personal effects appear across overlapping planes, resisting a singular point of view. This formal instability mirrors the contingent nature of identity itself: partial, performed, and continually negotiated through relation and observation.

Drawing on the artist’s recollection of her grandmother’s keepsakes – photographs, letters, and small everyday items handled and returned to over time – Glory Days considers what it means to preserve the evidence of a life. Meaning emerges not through singular images, but through aggregation, repetition, and proximity: how one element reinforces or unsettles another, how objects gather into emotional and cultural constellations.

In this shift from representation toward residue, Chiasson centers the traces of experience – the expressions, talismans, and materials through which a person learns to recognize themselves and be recognized by others. Memory is not preserved intact, but continually assembled: partial, contingent, and still in process.