Like most of us, Chloe Wise has turned her gaze inward over the past year. The Canada-born painter has been all but preoccupied by today’s political chaos, reflecting how public health concerns conflict with our individual desires for liberty and comfort. Across a new series of portraits, she proposes scenarios of familiarity, where smiles, hand gestures, and utterances are directly at odds with underlying realities of uncertainty, willful ignorance, growing inequality, and aspirational notions of “unity” that only reinforce the status quo. 

Very Private Little Random Possibilities (2021). Photography by Thomas Mueller.