Public Sculpture—Chloë Bass | #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America

Chloë Bass | #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America is a public sculpture and performance art project by conceptual artist Chloë Bass on view at CAAM starting June 21, 2023, the summer solstice. The sculpture, which takes the form of a participatory analemmatic sundial, consists of sixteen blue glass panels that collectively form a partial ellipse. While engaging with the sculpture, the human body functions as the gnomon—the necessary projecting element that casts its shadow onto each glass panel, determining the time of the day. Bass has engraved contemplative phrases onto each sundial panel that appear on the ground below in shadow form.

#sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America culminates the artist’s ongoing project, #sky #nofilter, which began during the lead up to, and aftermath of, the 2016 US Presidential Election. As a result of the election, continued killings by police, and the grief and anxieties caused by such events, the artist began capturing images of cloudless blue sky in an effort to keep time. Bass coupled the images with personal and political writing that was then shared through Instagram over the course of a year. The project expanded and became a scripted lecture-performance and a chapbook; more recently, Bass adapted the blue captures into a “magical painting” and glass and paper studies that were on view at Art + Practice in Leimert Park in 2022. The project’s continually shifting form considers what site-specificity means in both physical and digital space. #sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America extends the artist’s ongoing interest in public sculpture that materializes conceptual and abstract ideas. Bass continues to probe the anxieties caused by state violence and lack of governmental oversight in a series of intersecting and mounting crises, as well as the ways in which these anxieties color our shared experiences with space and time. This is Chloë Bass’s first permanent commission.

#sky #nofilter: Hindsight for a Future America is curated by Taylor Renee Aldridge, Visual Arts Curator and Program Manager.