Carlye Packer is pleased to present Role Play, an exhibition of new sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Claire Chambless, her first solo exhibition with the gallery and in Los Angeles. In Chambless’s laced rib cages, sarcomic dollhouses, and dissected chairs, one finds found or selected objects subjected to the same alchemical pirouettes as materials we might more commonly think of as mediums for sculpture. Combining found objects and materials sourced from diverse sites such as hardware stores and movie sets, Chambless’ sculptures explore autobiography, monumentality, and the formal qualities of familiar objects. The works reconfigure or remix semiotic systems at multiple strata simultaneously using a limited visual language of culturally-loaded symbols. In Role Play, the following materials were used: bone, pearl, latex, oyster shell, spears from the set of Gladiator (2000), mattress pad, wood, and foldable tailgating chairs with mesh beer holders. Chambless is interested in how objects make and remake each other, how people make and remake each other, how the world comes into being and is reproduced. In Role Play, there is no difference between a found object and a material, between sculpture and the human body, works are choreographed in a score that could be ever changing. At once deeply personal and universally resonant, her materially intricate works are both parafictional allegories and theatrical ’situations’ or ‘sets’ that invite the viewer to participate in rethinking various aspects of contemporary culture, including: digital avatarism, libidinal economy, style/fashion and the spatial politics of architecture and place. The result are sculptural objects that are essentially stable, but that perform as brittle or in a state of partial decay evidenced by the yellow hues, splitting, cracking, and flaking just below Chambless’s sculptural surfaces.