Infrastructure Meets the Human Experience in ‘41 Floors’
41 Floors is on view at Chapter NY from January 10 to February 15, 2025.
Photography by Charles Benton
A figure lays atop four different trains stationed at their resting stop in the train yard. In the painting Conductor, the figure's top and skirt mimic a labyrinth of abstracted, vibrantly hued city infrastructure networks, subtly inferring that the body is profoundly connected to its surroundings. The individual enlivens the city as the city constructs the framework for their life.
In 41 Floors, the current solo exhibition of paintings by Cheyenne Julien at Chapter NY, the artworks depict the intrinsic relationship between the built environment and the bodies that design its precise formula of meaning through physical construction and ascribed significance. In this recent body of work, Julien was inspired by the renowned architect Paul Rudolph and his drawings, which reimagined the urban landscape with geometric Modernism that renewed the vision of the built environment for the future.
Rudolph designed buildings that materialized and remained as drafts for New York throughout his career, yet the Tracey Towers in the Bronx was the only subsidized housing complex he designed. Throughout Julien’s oeuvre, she has depicted elements of architecture to frame the various landscapes and portraits, and she still lives to reinforce the significance of the built environment for those who live and interact within these spaces.
Her childhood home was an apartment in one of the Brutalist skyspaces that comprise the Tracey Towers, which she memorializes in her work. One of the smaller canvases, Building 20, lining the gallery wall, illustrates the building’s signage in electric teal blue and orange.
Photography by Charles Benton
Other works in the show depict areas around Tracy Towers that Rudolph included in his vision for community engagement for the building complex. Through Julien’s eyes, we see a complex reality that can only be revealed by someone who has had a concrete lived experience with this space.
Two glowing light sources in Twin Revival highlight a sliver of one of the planar modernist stairways the naked and unknowing eye can’t see from the street view. A body lays near the doors as lights beam from its eyes, keeping an eye out in the shadows out of protection for themselves and their neighbors in the painting Permanent Fixture.
Architecture and the body become one in Brutalist Baddie, where the figure’s fresh concrete completion connotes her multifaceted ability to be strong, adaptive, and perceptive.
One of the most striking works in the show, Paul’s Plan, appears as if it is a draft at first glance. A curving highway extending beyond the canvas leads the viewer toward an impression of nature that thrives outside the recessed apartment buildings. Emerging from the earth with a cigarette hanging casually on the edge of her lips is a woman with a hazy expression of mellow coolness. Did I wonder how and why she chose this spot to rest? Yes, and I would also like to join her placid state of being.
