Chase Spearance is one of 12 artists selected as a Gallery 263 2023–2024 Small Works Project artist. This project presents artwork in flat files at the gallery and on our website. Visit Spearance’s Small Works Project page →
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
My name is Chase and I was born on August 16th, 1998, which makes me a Leo. I grew up in upstate New York where I spent most of my time in the woods. When I was eleven, I started going to a live-action role-playing summer camp, which fostered my lifelong love for art. I still have many friends from camp in my life, and plan to work there again when I can. I moved to Boston in 2021 when I got a job offer here after graduating college during the first wave of Covid quarantine, and it is the first city I’ve lived in long-term. I started going to shows in the DIY music scene in Fall 2022 and now that is one of the most important parts of my life. While I’m not a musician, most of my friends in Boston are people I’ve met through the scene, and attending live performances is deeply energizing and inspiring. For now I work as an after-school teacher and while I love teaching art to kids and being a trans role model, I’m looking towards a career in which I can dedicate more of my time and energy towards uplifting and collaborating with other artists. Art is the most important thing to me, and I need to follow that truth.
What kind of art do you make?
I make as much art as I can. Recently I have been focusing on collage, linocut printing on paper and fabric, clothing alteration, and jewelry making, but I hope one day to have the resources to return to ceramics, and I get excited thinking about all of the mediums out there I have yet to try. Sculpture and drawing also factor into my artistic practice, and I hope to have a space where I can create large sculptures one day. I am also a writer of poetry, fiction and essays, though I haven’t shared much of that with the world since college. Sometimes I get caught up by perfectionism, so I think I seek out mediums where the process feels good and is as important if not more important than my end product.
What concepts does your art explore?
Sometimes while making a work I don’t realize what emotions I am expressing, and it only becomes clear to me once I’ve had some distance from the piece. Themes of queerness and mental illness are always there, because these are aspects of myself I am continually trying to express, understand and give shape to. I also use my art to work through sadness and rage about the ways the U.S. government and capitalist systems at large continue to fail the most vulnerable. Even when what I’m making does not address this directly, it’s something that is always on my mind. I’ve often found art for art’s sake to be devalued both in academic spaces and in our broader culture. In a college critique I once said I just wanted to have fun with my art and the entire class including the professor scoffed at me. Personally, most of my peers in that course were not making art that I found thought-provoking, but they expressed the attitude that if art does not “say something” or make an overt political statement, it is pointless. I know now that what I should have said in that critique (where I was presenting a 3 foot long ceramic dragon that has tragically been lost to time) is that I take the value of play seriously, as it is something adults are largely discouraged from doing in our society. Fun for fun’s sake does not further capitalism or make people easier to exploit. Neither does engaging in a process for the sake of the process rather than for the product that is created. For me, my creative process can be a type of play, and play itself is meaningful because it is a celebration of life.
Can you tell us about the work you have on view in your flat file drawer at the gallery?
Right now I have mostly collage work and prints on view in my drawer. I would consider my collage work an ongoing conversation between myself and the materials I use. I love collage as a medium because of how focused I have to be on the process. While sometimes I start with a vision, it is impossible for me to completely predict the images I will be able to find, since I use only found physical materials. I like weird stuff, and unsettling imagery. If I don’t start with a vision and instead let the medium be the guide, one work I make might inspire another, more refined work, so some of my pieces look like siblings or cousins. When I finish a piece, I know what worked best, what I enjoyed doing the most, where I got stuck, and whether I want to continue exploring similar concepts.
Where do you make your work?
I make the vast majority of my work at home in my apartment, mostly on the dining room table (which has hardly ever been used for dining) and since I tend to have more than one project in progress at a time, that table is usually very messy. I like to be able to get up in the middle of the process and walk away so I can come back and jump right in. If I’m feeling stumped creatively, I like to spend time in nature, where I might write stream-of-consciousness poetry, doodle, or sketch out ideas. If I’m working on something portable that will take a long time, I move to the living room couch and use my lapdesk to work while I watch tv with my partner.
What are your favorite materials to use? Most unusual?
Since I work in so many mediums and bounce around to different projects it is hard to say what my favorite materials are overall, but for my collage work I find it very hard to say no to vintage magazines when I find them. The thrift store that is walking distance from my apartment kept getting vintage Life magazines a few months ago and every time I went in for a while I would buy 2 or 3, so now of course I have way more of them than I really need. I love the look of hand-painted advertisements and vintage advertisements in general, as well as the colors and finishes one sees on old magazine paper. I’m also always keeping my eye out for vintage medical textbooks or home manuals. I’ve found a surprising number of these in little free libraries in my neighborhood. Vintage medical diagrams and illustrations are fascinating, and you can always find some totally incorrect outdated medical claim in there as well. It’s a freaky feeling to look through a book or magazine older than my parents and observe how much has changed and how much has stayed the same.
I also save packaging and garbage that I think might add texture or imagery to a collage. I am in the habit of picking up interesting garbage off the street. The ephemera of other people’s lives gives me a weird window into a wide breadth of different experiences. Some of this stuff I use for collage, some of it I can’t bring myself to alter and might make into its own project of preserving other people’s trash at some point. A couple of my favorite street garbage finds are a hospital printout of ultrasound photos (several months old when I found them) and a sticky note reading “LEARN HOW TO PARK”.
What historical and contemporary artists inspire you?
There are so many artists that inspire me, and so many whose names I don’t know yet. A few artists whose work has influenced me since childhood are Neil Gaiman, Hayao Miyazaki, Clive Barker, and Andy Goldsworthy. These four artists’ works span many mediums and genres, but something they have in common is giving the audience (or at least me) a sense of being transported, either to another imagined place or to a way of interacting with our world that I might have thought impossible before experiencing it. I also cannot overemphasize how inspired I am by my creative peers, and how important it is for me to engage with local art as part of my artistic practice. I grew up with a lot of artist friends, and even when someone works in entirely different mediums from me, it is fascinating and invigorating to learn about others’ creative processes and what meaning art has for different people.
When did you decide you wanted to be an artist?
I don’t think there was ever a point I decided to be an artist, I have just always been one. I know I dressed up as an artist on first-grade career day when I wore one of my parents’ shirts as a huge smock and carried around a palette and paintbrush. Unfortunately following that was 12 years of most adults I encountered telling me that wasn’t a realistic career path, and there were times in there that I believed them. Art has always been the most important part of life to me, and during times in my life when I haven’t prioritized it, everything else has suffered. I decided to get more serious about pursuing art professionally in the past couple of years. I used to worry that turning art into a job would make it tiresome, but I’m making art all the time anyway.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
I want to thank Gallery 263 for this opportunity. This is the first time I’ve had work in a gallery and I am both humbled and encouraged. I am honored to be included with so many other amazing artists, and it’s especially cool to be working with a nonprofit gallery space. Thank you for offering me this platform, and I look forward to see what I do and what Gallery 263 does in the future!