Chloe West, Choker, 2022, oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches

Chloe West
Out of Cheyenne

September 7 – October 29, 2022
Opens Wednesday, September 7, 6–8pm

Harper’s Apartment 
51 East 74th Street, Apt. 2X, New York, NY 10021
Thursday–Saturday, 12–6pm; no appointment necessary

Harper’s is pleased to announce Out of Cheyenne, Chloe West’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition features work produced by West in the past year. Out of Cheyenne opens on Wednesday, September 7, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist. 

In Out of Cheyenne, West inscribes her body within the bucolic landscape in which she grew up. The St. Louis-based visual artist paints herself in the nude, enveloped in bones and assorted objects she collects from the High Plains near Cheyenne, Wyoming, where West was born and raised. The artist notes that today she still feels at home as she journeys through pastoral territories like the Vedauwoo Campground and Medicine Bow National Forest, trailing cattle paths in search of bones. 

Through the meticulous process of gathering remains, West embodies a lineage of 17^th-century Flemish and Dutch painting, as well as the cadaverous iconographies found in memento mori and vanitas paintings. In this tradition, painters evoked the metaphysical realm through renderings of carcasses, skulls, and other assorted anatomical detritus associated with death. West builds off this canon, embedding animal bones—depicted with exacting precision—within introspective self-portraits that gesture at human mortality.

The corporal remnants found in West’s paintings bedeck chilling scenes set against the backdrop of the sprawling American West. In Spiked Back at Buffalo Hump, the artist renders herself from behind as she overlooks mountainous topography where supernal swashes of cyan melt into earthly auburns along the horizon. Elongated animal bones, which trace her bare spine, hover over her back like daggers as they point upward towards a blue sky, invoking a surrealist mood. 

West’s accumulated objects become a weapon in Choker, a disquieting self-portrait that depicts the artist’s chest and neck splayed out against gravelly rock. Billowing curls cascade along her shoulders as a string of bones beads her neck. West dilates the shadows cast by this necklace of remains. Slicing across the figure’s neck, the umbra recalls Baroque iterations of the female nude that likewise captured the profound contrast of light and shadow on the flesh.

Through this amalgam of art historical references, West excavates the social malaise buried in the land where she was born. In doing so, the artist dares us to unearth the perplexing, divine, and at times afflicting site where geography meets the body. West documents this knotty locale with an astute eye, taking note of the particulars of the past that inform the present. 

Written by Daniella Brito

Chloe West (b. 1993, Cheyenne, WY) received a BFA from the University of Wyoming in 2015, and an MFA from Washington University in 2017. She is the recipient of the 2021 Creative Stimulus Award from Critical Mass for the Visual Arts. Most recently, West’s work has been exhibited at Galerie Mighela Shama, Geneva (2022); Morgan Presents, New York (2022); PM/AM, online (2021); UNIT, London (2021); No Place, Columbus (2021); Pressure Club & Fjord, Philadelphia (2021); projects+gallery, St. Louis (2021); Monaco, St. Louis (2020); PRACTISE, Chicago (2019); and The Luminary, St. Louis (2019). Her work has appeared in publications such as ArtMaze, Booooooom, and Silver Space. West lives and works in St. Louis.

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Detail: Chloe West, Choker, 2022

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