Queer Thoughts presents Angelpad Post-Bella (I have been drumming since 2014), the first New York solo exhibition by Chloé Elizabeth Maratta.

The images and objects on view in this exhibition constantly present themselves, and are in a continual sequence of becoming their presentations. In Maratta’s artistic enterprises, self-styling is an opportunity to re-inhabit a name that was given to you, to create a new name, or to flip the meaning of one or the other. Often times, a name will precede the thing it designates, proposing a trajectory for the person/object/brand to follow. Angelpad (the pet name of the artist’s Roland SPDX sampling pad) is the physical nexus where Maratta dislocates language from its contextual hinges, recombining recorded samples in a butterfly effect of produced meanings (and emotions).

As a unifying motif throughout multiple works, decorous blonde plywood is a straightforward visual signifier of the artist’s necessarily DIY approach to every aspect of her artistic production, which encompasses visual works, clothing, jewelry, styling, and her most regarded pursuit, Odwalla1221, a music project between Maratta and the artist Flannery Silva. The satiny pink hues of her generational milieu, which appear here as the iridescent ground under collaged images, could be understood as a chromatic shift towards intimacy and self-determination. In Maratta’s hybrid fashion practice, styling is performed as an end in itself, the skills of dressing up are unleashed from their productive capacity and redirected towards other possibilities; styling qua styling. What might become a ‘look’ on Polaroid, was in passing more like just a glance.

Chloé Elizabeth Maratta (b. 1991) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent shows include a two-person exhibition with Flannery Silva at Schloss, Oslo; Karma, Los Angeles; and a solo exhibition at Species, Atlanta.