Caroline Chandler‘s work explores the presence of mythological narratives in the fodder of the everyday. By scrutinizing the significance of craft forms and by deploying the poetics of cliche, Chandler investigates how things are felt as a way of gaining knowledge. Chandler’s oeuvre of masks, power animals, and heavy crotched skins provides and opportunity to escape the corporeal in order to experience the fantastical. Panels featuring teddy bear paws, psychedelic toads, and animal familiars function as culture icons to guide the hand. Through formal play pompoms transform into hermaphroditic pollen; polymer clay casted Cheerios symbolize both the ring and the self. Vignettes of craft store detritus examine where culture ends and the individual begins. The human need to feel lies at the heart of the work literally through the tactical and metaphorically through the experience of the impalpable, namely: feelings.

Caroline Wells Chandler was born in Norfolk, Virginia. He completed his foundation studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and received his BFA cum laude from Southern Methodist University in 2007. In 2011, Chandler participated in the Bosch Young Talent Show at the Stieglitz Museum’s Hertongenbosch, The Netherlands. He has shown throughout the Southwestern United States. Chandler is a 2011 MFA recipient in Painting at the Yale School of Art where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques. He currently lives and works in Long Island City, New York.