As both an artist and a writer, Justin Chance (b.1993) explores engagements with the material and presented world through a wide range of practices such as quilting, drawing, printmaking, photography and sculpture. Chance’s work grapples with ideas of language, time, memory with a deep curiosity towards the mechanics of culture and history at large. In the materiality of his craft, Chance maps out the networks that can bind, divide, and immobilize, proposing to the viewer alternative approaches to interpret and consider the structures that make up the general and everyday.

Chance’s quilt-making, which has become a staple of his output over the last decade, is the result of a laborious process that follows traditional quilting protocol of no less than three layers of material—the top, middle and backing that are then stitched together all at once. Unique to Chance’s quilts is the emphasis on the middle layer composed of wet and needle felted wool that is then veiled by a layer of semi-transparent silk. Concealing and also abstracting the gaze, the top layer acts as a boundary for the viewer, enriching through obstruction; perhaps a tale of what we know, or don’t, what we can or cannot see, or what is still left to unravel.

Chance received a BFA and a BA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Chance’s work has recently been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at the following venues: Prairie, Chicago, IL (2024); Ginny on Frederick, London, UK (2024); NARANJO 141, Mexico City, MX (2024); Sydney, Sydney, AU (2023); Tara Downs Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Hesse Flatow (with Sylvie Hayes-Wallace), New York, NY (2023); D.D.D.D. Pictures (with The People of New York), New York, NY (2022); Apparatus Projects (with David Sprecher), Chicago, NY (2022); and Downs & Ross at Conceptual Fine Arts (with Kim Farkas), Milan, IT (2022). The artist’s work is included in The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection. Chance currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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