For Chloe Chiasson, the American South is not a fixed geography so much as a contested and generative terrain, one shaped as much by memory, desire, and imagination as by lived experience. Working across sculptural painting, collage, and assemblage, the artist constructs immersive narrative worlds that draw from her upbringing in Port Neches, Texas, while simultaneously unsettling the cultural myths through which the region has long been represented.

In Glory Days, her first solo exhibition with Southern Guild, recollection and nostalgia become vital tools: a means of interrogating inherited narratives while imagining alternative histories and future horizon lines. Structured as an open keepsake box, the exhibition gathers photographs, friendship bracelets, football portraits, beauty-pageant ribbons, watches, postcards, and other fragments of everyday life into a non-linear archive of evidence. These are not simply fragments of youthful recollection, but traces of the systems through which identity is shaped, signalled, performed, and made visible.

Through acts of reconstruction and reinvention, Chiasson transforms the visual language of the rural South into a site of possibility, where personal history, fantasy, and self-determination converge. In this conversation, we speak with the artist about world-building, adolescence, and the traces – both real and imagined – that become the evidence of a life.

Earlier works often reconfigured the visual language of the South into alternative worlds. In Glory Days, that impulse seems to shift toward something more observational. How has your relationship to storytelling changed?

Up to this point in my work, I have been reimagining the South and my home. But, naturally, the more I make, the more the work evolves – the thought process, intent, way of making, all of it.

For this body of work, I feel less like I’m reimagining something and more like I’m just telling a story, or telling the truth from a different angle. It’s less of an invention and more of an uncovering. Right now, I’m very interested in honing in on moments, objects, and ideas that are universal but with threads of small-town Texas and Queerness that inevitably show up in the work.

I’m thinking less about rewriting the South and more about expanding it from a different perspective and uncovering little truths, ambiguities, and paradoxes beneath the surface – allowing it to speak for itself and exist in softer, more subtle ways.

For me, nostalgia isn’t about romanticising the past. It’s about holding space for memory’s messiness, and as a way to unpack and reveal what has been hidden, forgotten, or overlooked – to open up new possibilities within familiar places or set memories. I like for time to feel like it’s collapsing a little, where it feels flexible, where past and present don’t sit apart but overlap and influence each other.

Throughout Glory Days, friendship bracelets, football portraits, beauty-pageant ribbons, postcards, family photographs, and other fragments of Americana appear as recurring motifs. What draws you to these familiar symbols?

I’ve always been drawn to Americana because it’s so visually rich. The colours, the day-to-day objects and places, how it’s all so familiar that it almost becomes invisible when you’re in it. It’s layered. It carries a romantic idea of freedom, identity, nostalgia, pride, and camaraderie, but beneath that, there’s a tension – a kind of wear and tear – that can dull what once felt special, but can also sharpen it by bringing those same details back into focus in a way that feels more honest.

It’s a language I grew up with, and I think that from a Queer perspective, there is a natural “reinvention” that takes place in using this language, sometimes showing up as a gentle critique. I’m trying to work with it in a way that is natural and inherent, trying to slow it down, use it as is, but in a way that feels intimate and personal by leaning into the dualities and cracks you can find in it. For all of its familiarity, there’s still so much room to question it, reinterpret it, and soften it.


Many of the figures in your work appear androgynous and occupy a space of adolescence or early adulthood. What interests you about this period of becoming?

I’m drawn to and often return to my youth because it’s such a complex moment in our lives where identity hasn’t fully settled. It’s a place in time to explore how we come into ourselves through observation and performance – trying things on, borrowing gestures, adopting postures, ideas, even entire versions of ourselves that don’t always fully belong to us yet or never will.

There is a constant push and pull between control and awkwardness, confidence and hesitation, fear and invincibility. Gender, in that sense, becomes less about identity as a category for me, and more so operates as a lived, embodied process; something that is continuously and often subconsciously constructed rather than ever fully resolved.

The exhibition unfolds like an open keepsake box – filled with photographs, fragments, and objects that have been handled, stored, and returned to over time. How did this structure emerge?

This body of work feels like it’s coming out of a very instinctive place for me. It’s loose, informal, disordered. Things aren’t carefully archived – they’re pinned, taped, or set out as if they’ve been taken out of a box, handled, and left mid-sort.

Some things are not valuable, but they’ve come to carry a funny importance not because of what they are, but because they’ve been held onto again and again. On their own, a lot of these things are meaningless or forgettable, but when gathered together, they start to accumulate meaning – to describe a life (or lives) in fragments.

Accumulation becomes the story. Meaning comes from how one thing leans on another to build a sense of time and self, from the way one object reinforces or complicates another. A ticket, a friendship bracelet, a coupon; on their own, they can feel interchangeable, forgettable. But when gathered together, they start to map something more specific: a social world, a set of values, a particular version of growing up. They point to moments of recognition, performance, belonging, love – things that have always been present in my work.

This body of work remains rooted in the same ideas and concerns, but shifts the focus from representation to residue. It centres the objects, moments, and memories that shape, affirm, or sometimes fail a person, and considers what it means to keep them.


Are there particular books, films, or texts that helped shape the thinking behind Glory Days?

Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison – a lyrical coming-of-age memoir that examines lesbian identity within the cultural norms of the South. It blends personal history, lesbian personhood, feminist theory, and working-class pride while emphasising that truth is often malleable, subjective, and deeply personal. The title itself comes from Allison’s aunt, who remarked, “Lord, Girl, there’s only two or three things I know for sure.” One passage has remained particularly resonant:

I’m a storyteller. I’ll work to make you believe me. Throw in some real stuff, change a few details, add the certainty of outrage. I know the use of fiction in a world of hard truth, the way fiction can be a harder piece of truth. The story of what happened, or what did not happen but should have—that story can become a curtain drawn shut, a piece of insulation, a disguise, a razor, a tool that changes every time it is used and sometimes becomes something other than we intended. The story becomes the thing needed.