Chanel Chiffon Thomas – Fractured Reality

In Gallery II, Goldfinch presents "Fractured Reality," an exhibition of embroidered mixed media paintings by Chanel Thomas (born 1991, Chicago, IL, currently lives and works in New Haven, CT). 

The narrative imagery in Thomas’ richly textured pieces is sourced from family archives, personal memories, and cultural references from the artist’s formative years. Scenes from family photographs are deconstructed into sketches and then built back up with colorful fibers, stitch by stich. A sense of texture and dimensionality is achieved through the varying weights of thread, which are sometimes densely layered and other times sparse. In Thomas’s works, domestic scenes appear to shift in and out of focus, resulting in visceral collisions of abstraction and clarity that invites viewers to decode the fraught relations between memory and reality, visibility and understanding.

Opening reception January 13, 3-6pm