Glory Days at Southern Guild views memory as an ongoing process of reinterpretation

Southern Guild presents Glory Days, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Chloe Chiasson, on view from May 21 – June 20, 2026, at their new New York location. The contemporary artist takes inspiration from her small-town Texas upbringing and creates works that explore memory, queet identity and the shifting landscapes of the American South. The art exhibition marks an evolution in her practice, shifting from reconstructing the personal and the cultural toward “a more instinctive process of uncovering—returning to familiar terrain with what she describes as a new clarity, where 'things that once felt fixed or unquestioned start to loosen, to open, to shift’,” Southern Guild notes.

Combining painting, sculpture and carpentry, the works on display at the art gallery change in appearance as viewers move around them. This fluidity reflects the exhibition’s central themes of memory and selfhood as unstable, continually evolving constructs. “Structured loosely as an open keepsake box, the exhibition unfolds as a non-linear archive of images and objects. A plastic photo album is paired with an oversized beaded friendship bracelet, suggesting a private attachment or unspoken crush. A cluster of prize ribbons brings together unlikely distinctions: a ninth-place beauty pageant, a softball throwing contest and a crawfish eating competition that earned first place, reflecting the particularities of a Southeast Texas upbringing,” the gallery explains.

Through these works, Chiasson examines how meaning emerges through accumulation and association rather than singular narratives. “A constellation of minor details that gather and lean on one another, gradually coalescing into a portrait of a life,” the gallery notes. Everyday objects become charged with emotional significance, tracing memory as an ongoing process of reinterpretation rather than preservation. “For me, nostalgia isn’t about romanticising the past. It’s about holding space for memory’s messiness,” says Chiasson in the official release. “A way to unpack and reveal what has been hidden, forgotten or overlooked—to open up new possibilities within familiar places.”

The show also reflects on the visual mythology of the American South through intimate, autobiographical imagery. Family photographs, snapshots from public swimming pools and carefully cropped portraits replace broader cultural narratives with more personal perspectives. “These gestures of selection and framing reflect a shift in scale from a more expansive articulation of place toward a closer, more particular view. The mythology of Americana persists, with its promises of freedom, pride and belonging, but is held in quieter tension—its meanings softened and complicated through proximity,” the contemporary art gallery explains.

Throughout the works, Chiasson’s young, androgynous figures embody identity as something that is continually shaped through performance. “As the artist describes, there is a constant ‘push and pull between control and awkwardness, confidence and hesitation, fear and invincibility’. Across the works, tenderness and dissonance coexist, giving form to the complexities of selfhood as it unfolds over time,” Southern Guild notes.

Inspired in part by her grandmother’s keepsake box filled with photographs, letters and everyday mementoes, Glory Days considers how lives are remembered through fragments. The exhibition proposes memory as an ongoing act of assembly, in which stories emerge not from complete records but from traces and objects that endure over time. “In this shift from representation toward residue, Chiasson centres the traces of experience (the moments, gestures and materials that shape, affirm or at times fail a person), and asks what it means to carry them forward. Memory is not preserved intact, but continually assembled: partial, contingent and still in process,” Southern Guild mentions.