Jonathan Lyndon Chase
Jonathan Lyndon Chase (b. 1989) is a Philadelphia-based artist whose drawings, paintings, sculptures, and videos focus primarily on Black queer intimacy and sexuality. The artist depicts figures in an expansive state, often transcending rigid identifiers of gender and merging with other bodies or their surroundings to create complex compositions. Chase’s works are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; Beth Rudin De Woody Collection, Palm Beach and the Rubell Museum, Miami, to name a few. Chase currently has an exhibition at Company gallery, New York through December 3rd.
What is your first memory of encountering art?
My first experience starts with my mom. She is really into interior design and drew floor plans and made color swatches, which were my first introduction to a creative language and brought me to drawing. I used to draw all the time as a kid. My mom still kinda throws down, she does watercolors. She also introduced me to horror early on like Michael Myers, The Fog, Freddy Krueger. I really thank her for introducing me to a wide and wild range of creative things.
That's amazing. I understand that anime and animation were also big influences?
Animation is our first teacher outside of our parents and academic settings. Animation had me thinking early on about censorship and gender in very complex ways. For instance, I was a huge fan of the Pink Ranger in Power Rangers, but learned that as a boy I should like the Blue Ranger. The actor who played him ironically came out later.
It’s alarming how quickly gender roles are foisted upon children. Often any behavior that goes outside the gender binary is met with fear, confusion or anger from parents and society at large. We learn to police ourselves at an early age.
I had a really hard time in high school, especially with family trauma and coming out at 16. I come from a very religious Christian Baptist household. Outside of the hardships I had with my mom concerning my sexuality, which is way better presently, she always supported me being an artist. I attended a Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) program in high school and later got my MFA there. I hit some roadblocks, because I wasn't being completely honest about my gender and sexuality, but overtime my works became unapologetically queer as I got to know myself more. Art became a spiritual practice for me. At that time, I was usually one of a few gay people and one of two or three Black people in my classes. I was struggling with double consciousness, rigidity around what art is supposed to be and trying to learn these intimate parts of myself while dealing with a faculty that's 99% white, which was traumatizing.
It’s beautiful to hear how the evolution of your art practice and self-understanding go hand in hand. It must have been difficult doing the work to transcend binaries within yourself and your practice while at the same time feeling like you needed to make yourself legible to the faculty.
Thank you for saying that. I want to give a shout out to Abigail Deville and Jennifer Packer, who definitely influenced my choice to go to PAFA. They were the first in the flesh Black artists that I met. Had I not met these terrific queer Black women, I'm curious as to how my work would have evolved. That goes to show that it is super important for these spaces to be diverse and inclusive, to have a varied range of people from all walks of life.
There is this assumption that the art world is very liberal, which is incorrect as it still very much centers the white male gaze. While it’s amazing that more BIPOC, queer and female artists are getting recognition, it can feel like tokenism and we clearly need to see a lot more sustained systemic change.
There are people who see Black and queer artists as objects, as a market and it's very dangerous. It’s rooted in American consumerism and appropriation. Representation is great, but it's not solely enough. Existing as a Black person in America is full of so much psychic violence, so my lived experience outside of the artworld has given me the tough skin needed to navigate it. I think it’s important for emerging queer and BIPOC artists to see more established artists speaking openly about our experiences, since many may feel jaded and guarded.
I appreciate how open you are about all elements of your experience. You had an excellent conversation with Scott Turi in Bomb magazine, where you spoke about how the transparency of your work relates to your personal transparency and vulnerability.
In undergrad, I used to make lots of soft textile work. I wanted to get away from the rigid ideas of what painting should look like. I started introducing soft, domestic items into my work, like pillowcases and bed sheets, which directly reference the body. I was also thinking about how paint activates fabric, the soakages and the way it stains. Similarly, the physical and psychic body absorbs different things that can leave a stain or mark.
Gender and sexuality are definitely forces that leave their marks on our bodies.
I'm a believer in entropy and gray area and when you're thinking about the gender binary, there’s so much brainwashing integrated into society. There's always either option A or B. Working with transparent materials, you can see layers mixed together with parts that are familiar, but also parts that are timeless and not necessarily trying to give you an answer. I'm talking about the body as something physical and astral, something that performs, that's vulnerable. They are definitely mirroring my transparency and the vulnerability that gives me strength.
I’m thinking of your tattoo that says Soft Boy, which I love so much. Vulnerability is so important to establishing connection and it is often something that young boys are discouraged from cultivating.
I'm interested in how the Black male body is depicted. There's an element of softness and tenderness that comes into play in my paintings. The transparent body is complicated, you're dealing with things like protection, power, submission and dominance. I take pride in being unapologetic about queer Black sex. I think it's important for us to explore in a way that isn’t caught up in respectability politics. When I think about pleasure points and power, this stereotype of masculinity and sexual performance, I feel like bottoms need more love. People try to reduce sexual performance down to the dick. I am interested in the power of entering someone's world and the very deep and euphoric experience of entering into a body.
When you’re growing up with masculine ideologies, you're taught to be hard in many ways, to resist being vulnerable and letting anyone in. We’ve talked a lot about masculine performance, this idea of being active and at attention. You create these open paintings where bodies unfurl, liberated from these pressures to perform in a certain way. I think it’s interesting that outside of erotic scenes, you often depict people lounging at home.
I’m really loving our current era where people are talking about introversion and domesticity. There's a fast paced culture of always moving and going and doing. I think it's super important to show the body at rest. I think a focus on mundane, “unproductive” activities is a counter to Capitalism.
This idea of interiority and the domestic reminds me of your recent exhibition The Big Wash at the Fabric Center, where you recreated a laundromat and made bespoke fabric that you used in paintings, sculptures and clothing. The laundromat is a place where the public and private come together. You’re washing underwear, sheets, all of these intimate items in a public space.
Thank you for mentioning the show. It is something that is so dear to me. The laundromat is this liminal space. There was a checkered black and white tile floor that functioned as a grid that represents public space, that dictates binary or black and white choices. There were soft sculptures of bodies, boxer shorts and towels that my husband and I had been using, but they were not washed so they had our bodies’ residue. The soft sculptures were abstract organic figures that disrupted the grid system. They were traveling through space, but the space isn't meant to be inhabited permanently - it's an intersection of brief moments that come together. I think the body functions like that in many ways.
It's like a chessboard where there are rigid moves you are compelled to make. The soft body sculptures have this freedom to exist outside of the lines, this movement and flow. There’s a sense of temporality and continued movement and change. This reminds me of how you’ve talked about adopting a worldview of embracing continual change and how being bipolar compelled you to find a way to embrace emotional highs and lows.
There's a lot of stigma around mental health. For me, some days are tough and others aren’t. When I started to really think about these ideas of nature as entropy it became so therapeutic. I'd like to invite us all to think about “mental illness” simply as a different way a body interacts with reality in space. I think that's really important to remind ourselves because you can really spiral and get caught in the idea that you're broken or you're so outside of the normal. Normal is an illusion, and now it's kind of boring. Life isn't promised to be easy. Once you're able to find your own relationship with change, then things can be easier and more pleasant to deal with. I think it’s just like in my practice, a change of material or medium reflects how we're constantly changing on a molecular level.
There are many themes we’ve discussed that your work engages in. Is there an aesthetic or other form of experience you hope viewers have when encountering your work?
I would like them to be able to take away a different relationship to change, some levels of empathy for themselves, and to accept their own bodies.
Is there any advice you have for artists who are starting out?
Work hard at your passion, but do not burn yourself out. Do not be afraid to make a lot of work, even if you don't think it's great. Just make a lot of fucking work. Document everything and make a strong archive of research material. Try to be as unapologetic as possible and care for yourself.
I love that. How do you take care of yourself?
I dedicate one day a week to rest and meditation. I spend a lot of time trying to celebrate myself and to be my own best friend, which helps me to relax and have downtime as a meditative practice of mindfulness. I do yoga and breathing exercises. It is really satisfying to be able to change the way I talk to myself in my head. I also spend time with friends and food, I love food. My husband says I read too much theory, so I've gotten back into Manga.
You've accomplished so much, but is there any dream you have?
Oh gosh. I want to have children one day.
You’d be such a good parent!
Oh, you're so sweet! I would also love to make a film one day. I'm working on a new horror story that I hope to finish by the Fall. I want to have a really generous, beautiful collection of art books that are centered around horror and science fiction. I'm also working on a video game.
It all comes full circle! Your mom showed you great works of classic Horror growing up and now you are creating your own. I love the world you are building and that you can bring so much of what we discussed to the broadest possible audience through film, video games and books.
I appreciate you so much. Thanks so much, it was great talking with you!
Thank you!
Yes art depicting the art of rest 🙌