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. Across her practice, Chiasson draws from her upbringing in small-town Texas to construct immersive, image-dense works shaped by memory, Queer subjectivity, and the symbolic architectures of the American South.

Operating between image and structure, Chiasson’s compositions bring together figures and cultural fragments into layered tableaux where intimacy and performance unfold in close relation. While earlier bodies of work often reassembled these signifiers into more deliberately reconfigured environments, Glory Days marks a subtle but significant shift. Rather than reconstructing, Chiasson turns toward a more instinctive process of uncovering – returning to familiar terrain with what she describes as a new clarity, where “things that once felt fixed or unquestioned start to loosen, to open, to shift.”

Extending outwards into the space through a process that merges painting, carpentry, and sculptural fabrication, the works shift and recompose as the viewer moves around them, resisting a singular point of view. This formal instability is not incidental but integral, mirroring the contingent nature of memory and selfhood.

Structured loosely as an open keepsake box, the exhibition unfolds as a non-linear archive of images and objects. A plastic photo album is paired with an oversized beaded friendship bracelet, suggesting a private attachment or unspoken crush. A cluster of prize ribbons brings together unlikely distinctions: a ninth-place beauty pageant, a softball throwing contest, and a crawfish eating competition that earned first place, reflecting the particularities of a Southeast Texas upbringing. A large, worn “America” watch, found among Chiasson’s grandfather’s keepsakes, carries a quieter, more ambiguous weight: an object preserved without clear reason, yet held onto over time. Meaning emerges through aggregation, proximity, and repetition: a constellation of minor details that gather and lean on one another, gradually coalescing into a portrait of a life. The mundane or incidental becomes increasingly charged, tracing memory not as a stable record but as a shifting, accumulative field.

Chiasson’s treatment of time reflects this sensibility. Past and present collapse into one another, producing images that feel at once immediate and estranged, lived and re-encountered. Nostalgia operates not as sentimentality, but as a method of attention: an effort to sit with the elusiveness of memory and locate the quiet tensions and contradictions that reside within it. “For me, nostalgia isn’t about romanticising the past. It’s about holding space for memory’s messiness,” says Chiasson, “A way to unpack and reveal what has been hidden, forgotten, or overlooked – to open up new possibilities within familiar places.” Here, memory becomes less an act of preservation than one of continual re-negotiation.

In this way, the works echo a broader tradition of Southern storytelling, where truth is understood as something felt as much as remembered. As Dorothy Allison writes in Two or Three Things I Know For Sure (1995): “The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have… becomes the thing needed.” Chiasson’s compositions move within this same space; where memory is partial, subjective, and continually reshaped in the telling.

The visual language of the American South remains present, but in Glory Days it is approached with greater specificity and intimacy. Rather than establishing a broad cultural landscape, Chiasson narrows her focus: a family portrait taken against a chain-link fence, a snapshot from a trip to the public swimming pool, a photograph carefully folded to isolate a central figure and exclude others. These gestures of selection and framing reflect a shift in scale from a more expansive articulation of place toward a closer, more particular view. The mythology of Americana – its promises of freedom, pride, and belonging – persists, but is held in quieter tension, its meanings softened and complicated through proximity.

Figures move through these environments with a similar sense of ambiguity. Young, androgynous, and documented in various states of becoming, Chiasson’s subjects embody identity as something provisional and performative, shaped through gesture, relation, and observation rather than innately resolved. As the artist describes, there is a constant “push and pull between control and awkwardness, confidence and hesitation, fear and invincibility.” Across the works, tenderness and dissonance coexist, giving form to the complexities of selfhood as it unfolds over time.

Glory Days unravels as a restrained yet deeply sentimental gesture, looking at what is kept, and why. Drawing on the artist’s memory of her grandmother’s keepsake – filled with photographs, postcards, letters, and small, everyday items handled, stored, and returned to over time – the exhibition considers how lives are held in fragments. Here, what gathers becomes the story. Meaning emerges not from singular images, but through relation: how one element reinforces or unsettles another, how repetition lends weight to what might otherwise be overlooked. In this shift from representation toward residue, Chiasson centres the traces of experience (the moments, gestures, and materials that shape, affirm, or at times fail a person), and asks what it means to carry them forward. Memory is not preserved intact, but continually assembled: partial, contingent, and still in process.