The World According to Chloe Wise

'It's for the lizard people. Representation for lizard people everywhere!'

Chloe Wise is tugging on a hand-made faux snakeskin Band-Aid the size of a skateboard hanging from the ceiling of Almine Rech in Brussels.

A nipple-shaped transparent latex plaster, the kind you get after a jab, the size of a vinyl record hung next to it. A giant Compeed blister plaster swung beside finger bandages—some made of leather, others rubber—and a shearling pad.

This entrancing collection of hand-made plasters set in front of a hospital blue wall is Variety Pack (2024), the monumental sculpture that dominates Wise's solo exhibition Torn Clean (24 April–25 May 2024).

I spoke with the Canadian-born, New York-based artist ahead of the show, which opened alongside the 40th edition of Art Brussels. Torn Clean is Wise's fourth exhibition with Almine Rech.

For the past decade, Wise has made oil paintings, videos, and sculptures that poke fun at the consumerist world we live in through a lens of art history, satirical wit, and often, food.

Whether it's sculptures such as Caesar Salad Chandelier (2021), in which Rococo-styled urethane romaine lettuce leaves hung from the ceiling of her 2021 show at Almine Rech New York; her overtly contemporary Old-Master-style paintings, featuring a 17th century-styled milkmaid posing with an open tin of Nestlé condensed milk, amusingly titled Lactose Tolerance (2017); or videos such as Meditatin' with Sheila (2020) where Wise—dressed in Dolly Parton wig—gives a guided meditation as Auntie Sheila, a Jewish aunt who's 'not your mother' but 'wishes [she] was'. She never fails to amuse.

Here in Brussels, viewers pore over flesh-tinted paintings—the artist or her friends posed semi-clad in her studio—chaotic still lifes littered with cigarette lighters, Tic Tac boxes, and Aquaphor tubes, alongside her larger-than-life sculptural Band-Aid box.

The exhibition was inspired by Harm's Way (2023), a portrait of Wise's friend with a gummy yearbook smile and a taunting trickster's face. The painting had been living in Wise's Manhattan studio ('right by the Empire State Building, it's so New York you wouldn't believe it!') for a year as Wise tried to pinpoint its place in the world.

'To me, she became a human Band-Aid,' Wise said. 'Her smile provided a sanitised narrative of the violence—the PG version of the bloody ordeal.'

The 'ordeal', Wise proceeded to illustrate, are those scenarios we all know so well. It's the smile of a mother ushering her guests out the door after a tantrum playdate. Goodbyes are said through a gritted smile before the wrath is unleashed on her enfant terrible.

It's the forced welcome of a friend who pulled the short straw to host another's birthday, ushering people in while subtly clocking the number of drinks in tow in the hope that a shortage could mean bed by midnight.

Similarly unhinged, is the leery gaze of a young girl in Malicious Compliance (2024) or Wise's frozen cackle in her double self-portrait Permission Deficient (2023).

It's this delicate balance between containment and eruption, coupled with this 'nothing to see here' attitude, that the Band-Aids, sealing and camouflaging, represent.

'It's the idea that when we go about our day-to-day life we need protections in place in case we start oozing any of the liquids inside of us such as blood or piss or tears,' Wise explains. 'We need to clean up our messes and keep it all inside of the flesh bag so we can operate.'

Wise's description of our body as a 'flesh bag' was one in a run of wonderfully loony, but sensical observations; an inversion of her infectious, yet refreshingly straight talking character.

'Thank you for your service finger band-aid,' she said, contorting her body into the shape of an H-shaped bandage. 'You're such a beautiful curvy shape. I love your bod.'

It was bread bags, not flesh bags, that initiated her rise to stardom just a year after she graduated from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2013.

Wise produced a set of hyper-realistic sculptures in the form of bagels, baguettes, waffles, and more. Crafted in plastic urethane and painted over with oil paint, the bags were fitted (and amusingly titled) with the fashion industry's top labels.

Ain't No Challah Back (Pack) Girl saw a braided challah morph into a Prada backpack, while a gold chain attached to two lightly dusted waffles became Belgian Moschino Waffles (both 2015). (Pictures of the works were shared on The Guardian here).

In Wise's still lifes here in Brussels, she seems to delve into the contents of a bag, but this time it's a chaotic tote rather than a Prada clutch. Paintings such as Body Part (2024) and An ideal pebble, a perfect pond (2023) are littered with a Compeed box, a caviar tin, and a tangled iPhone charger that wraps around a bottle of what could be Spray N' Wipe.

It's the 'man drawer', the organised mess of an artist's studio. A studio which, if Wise were to have it her way, would be kitted out with a tanning bed, I was overjoyed to learn.

And like with Band-Aids, or the acrylic nails worn by her subject's hands, a tan—real or not—becomes an extension of the body, another skin. A skin which, after one brief and entertaining interview with Chloe Wise, you quickly realise she feels very comfortable in.