The Best Little Whore House in Texas

Wells Chandler has a room in his Long Island City apartment dedicated to yarn. Giant bags brimming with color-coordinated fbers are piled up everywhere, save the few square feet where he has been sitting for 10 hours a day, crocheting an array of characters for his solo show, “The Best Little Whore House in Texas,” on view at Roberto Paradise in San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 8 through November 28. The artist has made three new bodies of work for the exhibition: a collection of cowboys; a team of basketball players; and a group of his “Orgins”—fgures with lines representing the scars from surgical breast removal in the midst of jumping into acrobatic air splits, with vibrant rainbows for genitals. The latter have appeared before in Chandler’s work, but here the collection of “Orgins”—the name is a playful melding of the words origin and organ—are dressed as characters from the Village People: There’s a cop, a construction worker, a leather daddy, and a sailor. Yet the artist is drawing from more than just ’70s camp, citing the Tibetan Book of the Dead as an equal inspiration for these forms. Other references abound, both high and low: characters from the musical Oklahoma, for instance, as well as iconography from the 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece. And the pervasive anatomical fuidity at play has an autobiographical angle for Chandler, who is transgender. The exhibition at Roberto Paradise includes his frst self-portrait, and he acknowledges that this image of himself, and his willingness to make it, results from a liberating moment: “I feel more comfortable now than I have since the age of fve. I grew up in a pretty conservative area of the country—Virginia Beach— that didn’t really allow for me to be who I am.” The self-portrait, titled Bench Warmer, portrays Chandler’s crocheted figure flying across the wall in mimicry of Michael Jordan’s classic silhouette, surrounded by a ragtag band of teammates. They are all Chandler’s creative heroes: Robert Gober dribbles by, Hieronymus Bosch tries not to lose his hat mid-play, and Katherine Bradford goes for a slam dunk. Giotto di Bondone, Forrest Bess, Matthias Grünewald, Joseph Beuys, Mary Heilmann, Jean Dubuffet and a cave painter all play backup, rendered in the classic poses of trading cards, yet another inspiration. “I used to collect them, but I didn’t know anything about the stats,” Chandler says. Always the aesthete, “I ended up making bad trades because another card looked better or was fashier. I just thought they were beautiful.”

Text by Juliet Helmke