Jonathan Lyndon Chase is a Philadelphia-based visual artist whose works—drawings, paintings, sculpture, video and sound—focus primarily on Black, queer domestic intimacy. The artist was invited to work with the FWM Studio in the museum’s renowned screenprinting facilities to conceptualize and produce an original design. Chase employed this newly-created yardage as canvases on which to make a new suite of paintings, as well as soft sculpture and clothing. Big Wash is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and will feature new work created during their 2019-2020 screenprinting residency at FWM.
For Big Wash, Chase turns their attention to the laundromat as a site that is at once private and public. With newly created paintings, drawings, and video, they continue their signature ability to move seamlessly between history and fantasy, as well as interior and exterior, with vivid depictions of eroticism, domesticity, queerness, nostalgia, and tenderness. Chase’s vibrant textile design punctuates the exhibition and acts as a stand-in for Black queer bodies navigating both the rawness of the urban landscape and intimacy of domestic settings.
“In addition to championing an emerging and prescient voice in our own community, as well as the contemporary art landscape in general,” shares FWM Curator Karen Patterson, “Big Wash links back to FWM’s roots: the process of screenprinting, and the role it has long played in influencing an artist’s practice.”
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