Chloë Bass and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore in Conversation

Join Soft Services artist Chloë Bass and author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore for a conversation about the body and colonialism, intimacy and loss, cruising and alienation, communal possibility, and intimate transgression. Bass and Sycamore share a mutual interest in the pervasive potential of strange, everyday intimacies, and a mutual enraged concern about society's failure to allow for such intimacies (or, worse, its commitment to police) as an important element of receiving proper interpersonal care. The conversation will focus on the embodied experiences produced through interaction with Soft Services' stone sculptures, and examine how acts of noticing open the door for new engagements with social and environmental landscapes. The dialogue will be punctuated by readings from Sycamore's genre-bending book The Freezer Door (2020), portions of which are set in Volunteer Park.

Chloë Bass (born 1984 in New York, NY; lives and works in Brooklyn) earned her BA in theater studies from Yale University and her MFA in performance and interactive media from Brooklyn College. Her work has been widely exhibited both nationally and internationally, including in solo exhibitions at The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Germany; Temple Contemporary, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; and BRIC Arts, Brooklyn, NY. Bass has also shown in group shows at the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Public Art Fund, New York; Artspace New Haven, New Haven, CT; The Kitchen, New York; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; and the New Museum, New York, NY. She has held numerous fellowships and residencies, including as a 2020–2022 Faculty Fellow for the Seminar in Public Engagement at the Center for Humanities (CUNY Graduate Center), a 2020–2022 Lucas Art Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, and a 2019 Art Matters Grantee. Previous honors include a residency at Denniston Hill, the Recess Analog Artist-in-Residence, and a BRIC Media Arts Fellowship.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the author of The Freezer Door, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of Oprah Magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books of 2020, and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Her latest anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, was named one of BookRiot’s “100 Most Influential Queer Books of All Time,” and her next book, Touching the Art, will be out in November 2023. Sycamore lives in Seattle.