Chantae Elaine Wright’s latest body of work unfolds like a cinematic dreamscape, where memory, identity, and sensuality converge in multiversal dimensions. The title of this exhibition, It Wasn’t a Dream, It Was a Flood, draws inspiration from Frank Stanford’s film, a poetic narrative that mirrors the surrealism and raw emotional intensity present in Wright’s paintings. Like Stanford’s cinematic world, Wright’s canvases refuse linearity; they exist in a space where time dissolves, and history, both personal and collective, seeps through in waves of color and form.
Delving into themes of queer sensuality, introspection, and the layered realities of Black womanhood, Wright’s work is an ongoing exploration of identity —her own, as well as the collective memory of what America is today. Her paintings possess an ethereal quality, a simultaneity of moments that appear to exist across multiple dimensions yet coalesce into a singular, immediate experience; their atemporality is one of the most captivating aspects of her work, creating a visual language that allows past, present, and future to coexist within the same canvas.
Color plays a crucial role in Wright’s storytelling. Large planes of color become the foundation of the narrative, while her distinctive black lines serve as incisive commentary, transforming into a form of visual writing. These continuous, deliberate marks act as an inscription of thought and emotion, tracing the complexities of identity and experience.
One of the standout pieces in this series, Indentations, is a profound meditation on history, desire, and erasure. Its dark color palette evokes a sense of fire and destruction, with deep layers of pigment revealing spectral faces, their presence felt more than seen. The painting’s ambiguity allows for a range of interpretations, from the charged eroticism of bodies in tension to the weight of historical and political struggle. The work speaks to the complexities of Black identity, a history marked by both resilience and trauma, where figures emerge and recede like echoes of the past.
Mirrors also play a significant role in Wright’s visual lexicon, further emphasizing the themes of duality and self-perception. They invite viewers into the work, implicating them in the act of looking and being looked at, questioning the boundaries between self and other, reality and illusion.
Wright’s exploration of identity in flux resonates with Arthur Rimbaud’s philosophy, particularly his famous assertion, “Je est un autre” (“I is another”). Rimbaud’s vision of the self as fluid and ever-changing finds a visual counterpart in Wright’s paintings, where figures and spaces refuse to settle into fixed definitions. Her work, much like Rimbaud’s poetry and Stanford’s film, dismantles the conventional boundaries of selfhood, inviting a constant reimagining of identity as something unfixed, shifting, and deeply interconnected with both personal and collective memory.
In Wright’s universe, nothing is static. Her paintings exist in a state of flux, where every stroke and color choice contributes to an ongoing dialogue about existence, identity, and the politics of visibility. Like Stanford’s film, her work does not merely depict—it immerses, floods, and transforms. This exhibition is not just a collection of paintings; it is an invitation into a world where time folds upon itself, where bodies and histories collide, and where the act of seeing becomes an act of understanding.
