Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Now I’m home, lips that know my name (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
Marking their first solo exhibition in the UK, artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase opens a new show Now I’m home, lips that know my name, at Sadie Coles HQ, making for an explorative, domestic installation that embraces the Black Queer experience of love, sexuality, subjectivity and identity; and the profound depth of the capacity for intimacy and pleasure in both public and private spaces, that remain central to their practice.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Now I’m home, lips that know my name (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
The artist, whose multidisciplinary practice over the last several years has spanned a variety of media, ranging painting, sculpture, video, installation, poetry and sound, has built a body of work defined by intimacy and exuberance, expression as a powerful force and subject in turn. Friends and lovers appear in the works, depicted in a gentle and expressive hand, and always centered on the notion of shared space and emotion.
Chase’s installation here emphasizes this sense of shared space, creating a home within the gallery as a sanctuary for the unapologetic expression of the self and communal, non-binary ways of being. Encompassing a new group of paintings, drawings, soft sculptures, installation and a video, their works mediate a kaleidoscope of Black bodies, in which flesh, skin, limbs, orifices and their surroundings overlap and condense into sensual amalgamations.  Eluding narrative, time and space are envisaged as compound, their multi-layered, textural canvases and soft sculptures instead conjuring a sensory experience, illuminating their subjects’ vulnerability, elation and ecstasy, or the transitory expression of self-actualization.
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Now I’m home, lips that know my name (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Now I’m home, lips that know my name (Installation View), via Sadie Coles HQ
Throughout their work, a visual language of multiplicity recurs, in the fused forms of bodies on bodies and covert motifs-such as flowers, masks, lamps-that self-reflexively revel in the simultaneity of transness and non-binary subjectivity in the everyday.  Tattoos of roses appear as a romantic metaphor for the pleasure points; and equally represent non-binary beings. The presence of masks likewise invoke the freedom of self-actualisation, signifying the possibility of multiple identities, role play and protective anonymity – as well as arousing connections with porn and specific type of machismo associated with gangster and rap music of the 1990s-2000s.  Speaking of the representation of sexuality in their work, Chase has stated: ‘my work is a source to mediate and reflect and to think about different ways that you can exist. There’s not just option A or B. There’s so many ways you can exist.’
The show closes March 11th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Jonathan Lyndon Chase [Exhibition Site]
