Porcelain, 2025
Airbrushed acrylic on canvas
Evoking the fragility of porcelain, the softened face hovers between presence and erasure, offering only a trace of identity that resists stable interpretation. Against delicateness, a rigid red boundary cuts sharply across the composition, imposing a structure both arbitrary and authoritarian.
Chandler stages this tension as a meditation on the esoteric and the absurd; the ways in which meaning flickers at the edges of perception, even as external forces attempt to contain or define it. The work reflects the artist's inference of instability, unresolved encounters, and the quiet dissonance that shapes contemporary experience.
Untitled, 2023
Oil paint on unstretched canvas
This work originates as an absurdist paradox: painting the void as a way to resist it. Tension between contemporary performance and creative identity.
Matejko's Stanczyk, a figure outwardly dressed for comedy yet internally burdened by clarity, reinterpreted as a product of cultural saturation. Even as identity fractures, loops, or collapses into uncertainty, the act of defining self becomes a quiet defiance: a refusal to disappear.
Untitled, 2024
Oil on canvas
Reworking a familiar Catholic motif, the grieving mother, it is removed from its European framing and returns its emotional charge to its historical ground. While the source echoes depictions of the Virgin Mary, a woman from Palestine, the figure is placed in a religiously ambiguous garment, allowing her to stand not as a singular icon but as a proxy for the mothers in Palestine mourning children lost to systemic violence.
The expression she carries is intentionally unresolved. Her upward gaze can register as sorrow, prayer, hope, despair, or numbness depending on the viewer’s own experiences. By refusing a single emotional reading, the painting opens itself to projection: it becomes a space where personal histories, cultural memory, and present political realities collide. In this ambiguity, Chandler disrupts the didactic clarity of traditional iconography and instead invites a more intimate, subjective encounter.
This indeterminacy also aligns with Chandler’s broader practice, which is grounded in absurdism and the collapse of stable meaning. By reanimating a motif emptied through repetition and doctrine, the work generates new meaning through the act of painting itself, a gesture of resistance in the face of erasure. The figure’s grief, or hope, or uncertainty becomes a shifting surface onto which viewers locate their own emotional truths. It is an image that refuses to close itself to interpretation.
Scrooge, 2022
In this work, Chandler visualizes the disorienting way time is experienced rather than measured. The three faces form a fragmented timeline: the past, present, and future. One fading, one fully articulated, and one obscured by darkness, suggesting an uncertain future. Below, small figures move freely across the ground, pointing to the irrational, elastic way memory and time operate in consciousness. Rather than a scientific constant, time becomes an absurd, shifting force that cannot be held or observed from the outside. The repetition of the face reflects the futility of trying to see oneself clearly across changing states, turning the painting into a meditation on aging, identity, and the instability of temporal experience.