studioVISIT: Chloë Bass

“As a person who’s used to living in a metropolis, I love the feelings of being alone in public, the interstitial spaces that are a necessity when we spend so much time getting from place to place, mostly in view of / in indirect contact with other people. I really miss, during the pandemic, the feeling of being in some random location and getting the news of a major event.”

Chloë Bass (born 1984, New York) is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual (The Bureau of Self-Recognition, 2011-2013), has recently concluded a study of pairs (The Book of Everyday Instruction, 2015-2018), and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place, 2018-2022, an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families.

Chloë received an MFA in Performance & Interactive Media at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and a BA in Theatre Studies at Yale University. Her projects have appeared nationally and internationally, including recent exhibits at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, BAK basis voor actuele kunst, the Knockdown Center, the Kitchen, the Brooklyn Museum, CUE Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the James Gallery, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College, CUNY, where she co-runs Social Practice Queens.

Image courtesy of the artist