STATEMENT OF WORK

Jo Chate invites us into a space where the seen gives way to the sensed, uncovering moments of uncertainty and revelation.

Her complex paintings illuminate the slippery contours of the unknown offering a meditation on the ambiguity beneath familiar forms and places we inhabit. Rather than presenting resolved spaces, each composition invites us to dwell within the shifting, indeterminate and unresolved.

Grounding the work in the recognizable textures of everyday life, such as bodily forms, shopfronts, and nearly-forgotten buildings, the familiar appears fractured. Through layered surfaces and architectural motifs, viewers find themselves at sites of collapse where the built world falters. Viewers are left navigating a physical terrain that is now governed by the fallible nature of memory, perception, and emotion.

As spatial certainty gives way, Chate’s spaces loosen from the rigidity of reality. Shadows drift where walls should be. Mannequins, instigating questions of gender or agency, hover like spectral figures. These apparitions awaken us to the captivating facets of the surreal seeping in through distortion. Echoing the suspended logic of dreams, meaning is now felt more than understood through the translucency within the artist’s environments.

Within the interplay of the real and the unreal, the artist constructs sites of fragmentation that reflect the instability of concepts such as identity, shelter and time. Through this balance, Chate proposes living with the unknown as a vital condition. This is not a flaw in perception but a space for transformation and possibility. 

Chate compels us to embrace this newfound dislocation of certainty. Rather than seek resolution, the viewer is called to linger in these unsettled states. Chate’s work reminds us that it is within uncertainty, between clarity and collapse, that new ways of seeing, sensing, and being take form