Psychedelic Soccer Dada

Psychedelic Soccer Dada is the first regional solo exhibition by the Bronx-based artist Wells Chandler and presents a unique and expansive drawing installation. The exhibition features Chandler’s iconic crocheted, genderqueer figures, tie-dye bean bag chairs, embroidered Santas, and drawings made in collaboration with the artist’s friends and students, as well as selections from Chandler’s large collection of works on paper by neurodiverse artists. Chandler uses so-called craft materials, including yarn, thread, fabric, and plaster (he sources many of his materials from craft supply stores), to engage with histories of art, cultivating a radically queer aesthetic that is inclusive and nonhierarchical. Language is also integral to Chandler’s methodologies. He metaphorically explores, for example, the Germanic word for queer, or “twerkah” meaning twisted, in the techniques employed in knitting and crochet. Through a highly tactile exploration of drawing, Psychedelic Soccer Dada crafts a queer visual language that critically adopts humor, word play, etymologies, material translations, and subjective interpretations to destabilize artistic conventions. 

Psychedelic Soccer Dada counters the idea of the solitary artist by centering Chandler’s ongoing artistic collaborations with family members, friends, artists, and students. Over one hundred collaborative drawings, playfully mounted on school lunch trays, appear as a boundless exquisite corpse, where individual lines and forms merge together to form a single and seamless composition. Stylistically diverse, the drawings range from understated and refined to those that are boisterous, humorous, and even a bit raunchy. Chandler views this multi-authored approach as a queer art form that amplifies conversations around queer representation and identity.

Images of Santa Claus, a recurrent subject Chandler has explored in painting, embroidery, crochet, and sculpture, are represented in the exhibition in a series of embroidered drawings on canvas. Chandler mines diverse folkloric traditions from around the globe, viewing modern day Santa as a subversion of “normative standards of decency and taste through craft and excess.” In diverse media and iconography, Psychedelic Soccer Dada highlights the medium of drawing—whether using thread, pencil, or yarn—as an exuberant expression of queerness that is informed and shaped 

Text by Lynne Cooney