Home-grown artist Anastasia Chloe featured at Charles City Arts Center in September

By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

‘Expanding Interior” is the title of the Charles City Arts Center’s September exhibit, featuring the work of home-grown artist Anastasia Chloe.

Chloe is a multidisciplinary artist, focusing on themes of home and domesticity. Her work explores notions of interior and exterior personal spaces, “dancing between the tangible physical world and that of memory and emotion.”

“I like to think about how the stories that we tell in our families. Even if you didn’t necessarily experience it yourself, they become part of your personal narrative,” Chloe said Thursday as she set up her exhibit at the CCAC. “My art is personal, but I’ve been told people insert themselves into it a little bit as they think about their own experiences.”

The CCAC will hold an online opening reception for Chloe on Friday, starting at 5 p.m. via Facebook Live Stream. The stream will be available for viewing on the CCAC’s Facebook page throughout the month.

“If folks have questions as they view my work online, they can post them and I will be more than happy to talk with them about it,” Chloe said.

Born and raised in Charles City, Chloe’s mother was once the director at CCAC. Chloe graduated from CCHS in 2014 and studied art at the University of Northern Iowa. She graduated from UNI in 2019 with a BFA in studio art, an emphasis in photography, and a concentration in museum studies.

“Originally I was going to do art education, but then I switched to BFA studio art,” she said.

Much of the work from this exhibit is from her Bachelor of Fine Arts show, although she does have a few new pieces.

“Most of my work is photographs, but I’m interdisciplinary, so there are going to be some sculptures, as well as a sound piece,” Chloe said. “Most of my work focuses on themes of home and familial past shared memories.”

Some of her favorite pieces are cyanotype art. Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of blueprints and other drawings.

“I grew up in a house that was in my family for a long time,” Chloe said. “My mom’s dad moved to Charles City as a kid in the 1960s and bought the house that I grew up in. So my grandfather, my mother and I all grew up in that house.”

She said her September exhibit at the CCAC explores the idea that personal domestic space can transcend its own physicality, “becoming something larger than the sum of its parts.”

“A home is more than its doors, walls, floors, and windows — it has a life of its own,” Chloe said. “When entering these spaces, the memories they hold are embedded within them, similar to the presence felt in sacred places.”

Chloe currently lives in Cedar Falls. After graduation, she accepted a position at UNI as the collection photographer for the UNI art gallery, and is working on a project to get photographs of all the gallery’s artwork online.

“They have a collection of over 4,000 pieces, and they just recently shifted their collection to an online database, searchable for students and the general public,” she said.

Chloe said that currently there are titles and descriptions of all the pieces, but no images, and that’s where she comes in.