Chapter NY is pleased to present Cheyenne Julien and Ann Greene Kelly at Art Basel Miami Beach 2021. Julien and Kelly recreate subjects from their daily lives that bare traces of bodily encounters. Their works shift between the constructs of form and function, manipulating objects and their contexts to convey meaning and personal histories.

Julien presents a series of paintings that depict objects from her family’s home. In Dad’s Tools, she depicts her father’s shoeshine kit as a type of portrait, including brushes and tubes of polish that resemble the artist’s own painting implements. In Front Door, a security bar leans across a chair to secure the front door of her parents’ apartment in the Bronx. This nighttime scene poignantly alludes to practices of survival and undercurrents of anxiety present in daily life.

Kelly presents her first-ever cast aluminum sculpture – its form eliciting a familiar mode of bodily engagement while also providing a site of display. Within its surface, the artist embeds hollowed-out sardine cans, previously used for a quick dinner or a makeshift ashtray, as vessels for sculptural reliefs including plastered, collaged, and hand-drawn elements. Both incorporated within her larger sculptures and mounted directly to the wall, Kelly’s can sculptures provide small windows into the artist’s imagination.

Both artists consider the body’s connection to, and its dependence on, utilitarian objects. Together, their work emphasizes the formal value of their subjects, shifting from a meditation on the body within architectural space towards an exploration of the body’s influence over inanimate subjects.