Grief, as they say, comes in waves. But it isn’t rhythmic or predictable. It’s unmooring. A wash. It is reiterative though—grief. It makes us look at information again and again for an explanation, or a balm, or to open up time somehow. Images, notes, residues—we look to inert materials for life, for more. Our understanding changes, the material changes, and we change.
The thirteen works in Zoe Chait’s exhibition What dream return to an archive of images the photographer first showed at Ramiken, New York, in 2021. Sensuous and vulnerable, those works explore the subtle dynamics of Chait’s relationship with her subject, the visionary music producer Sophie. From 2017 to 2020, Chait documented Sophie—an artist who protected her anonymity—as she came out as a trans woman and embodied SOPHIE, a kinetic, critically beloved performer. As tender as they are, those works reveal a profound distance from their subject. The kind of distance that only becomes apparent in the context of desire or love. We see the photographer in love with a figure who is coming into herself as she becomes public. We see the photographer searching for the person they know in the one they share with the world, accounting for all the experience between the images. On January 30, 2021, six months before that exhibition opened but after the work had been made, Sophie died in an accidental fall.
Nearly four years later, Chait has reentered her images of Sophie. The resulting works, and their departure from those shown in 2021, trace something of grief’s redoubling. As Chait revisited the images, she found herself moving between printed positives and negatives to unearth some raw material, abstracting figure and ground to reflect on presence and absence. As they were in the beginning, these images are guided by Sophie’s rituals and orientation to the world, her music—its plasticity and uncanny, almost tactile quality—all of it unfinished and yet complete, reverberating everywhere.
In Mexico City, Chait visited a master printer of photogravure, a nineteenth century printing process in which a copper plate is etched using a thin red gelatin tissue resist. In the studio, Chait was drawn to the unetched plates, as objects, mid-process. In the visceral hues of iron oxide, the gelatin resist forms a spectral image that hovers on the copper. What dream centers on two pairs of such objects, each a positive and negative version of the same image. The exhibition takes its name from the first, a still from a video Chait shot on the set of one of SOPHIE’s music videos. In it, Sophie appears in a glamorous maw, her face poised and lucid among dramatic lighting and the shadows of dancers. The second pictures Sophie lying softly on a bed, nude, transcendent and open. These works are painterly and intensely material. They offer up a liminal space in which the image isn’t set—it is undone, still open to chance and vulnerable to time.
Here, Chait has also reconceived her video installation Projection Reflected (2017–2020). On an arrangement of aluminum panels, each with a different alignment of grain, overlaid projections cohere moments of intimacy that variously triangulate around the artist, her subject, and the camera. One video pictures Sophie as she gazes into a monitor before a shoot, adjusting her hair; she is looking at herself in the service of a public image. Another projection reveals Chait’s hand, as she gently moves Sophie’s chin to shift the angle of her face, lit by gauzy afternoon light. We hear ambient, transitory noise that suggests an ongoingness—verbal pauses, breath, the static pull on a Juul. The videos loop, each with a different duration, generating endless moments to pore over, to consider anew.
—Annie Godfrey Larmon
Zoe Chait (b. 1992, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. Her first solo exhibition, Noise, showed at Ramiken, New York in 2021 and was reviewed in Hyperallergic, Interview Magazine, Surface and Autre. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and France. In 2023 she was an artist-in-residence at Providenza in Corsica, France. She received her BA in 2014 from The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.