Chloe Luisa Piñero: The Only Way Out is Through

Chloe Luisa Piñero is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Philadelphia, PA, who works in mixed media painting, collage, and sculpture. Reflecting on personal experiences and familial histories from both her native home of Philadelphia, and her ancestral home of Puerto Rico, Piñero aims to preserve stories and memories tied to place and material, while exploring themes around gender, queerness, and desire as they relate her own identity.

For Piñero, collage and assemblage are processes that explore the nuances of mixed identity and the multiplicity of experience while challenging larger social and cultural norms embedded in material. Much of Piñero’s work disrupts traditions around the depiction of the female body in figure painting through the use of unconventional materials and fragmented compositions. In combination with painting mediums, the figures and environments are built from objects sourced from physical spaces like thrift, hardware, dollar, and discount beauty stores, and from digital spaces like vintage adult magazine archives, and Instagram explore-pages. Gathering materials and revisiting places from the past becomes its own practice of self-reflection, identifying, and preservation.

In her most recent work Piñero focuses on the female gaze and themes around queer desire. Through the use of imagery sourced from lesbian media and vintage lesbian photo archives Piñero explores ideas of queer legacy and representation. The figures in this work are constructed from fragments of conventionally “desirable” bodies, and constructed into grotesque, Frankenstein-like figures which have grown to reference this “untamed woman” trope that is seen in variations across media. Intrigued by how this trope is often portrayed in horror genres with queer or lesbian characters, Piñero is interested in exploring the construction of her own figures and visual landscape as a way to reclaim and bring new meaning to this identity.

Chloe Luisa Piñero received her BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 2018. She has appeared in numerous group exhibitions including Latchkey Gallery in New York, Kathryn Shultz Gallery in Cambridge MA, and Vox Populi in Philadelphia. She has presented solo exhibitions at Philadelphia Magic Gardens, Blah Blah Gallery in Philadelphia, and Stella Elkins Gallery in Philadelphia. She was recently the artist educator in residence at the Philadelphia Museum and a resident apprentice at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. This is her second solo exhibition with Hyacinth.