Chambliss Giobbi

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

For the past several years, I’ve used melted children’s crayons as my primary medium—rooting my work in the raw sincerity of early childhood mark-making. Crayons, so closely tied to our first creative journeys, evoke a sense of honesty and wonder. I've made a few bodies of work using this process. In 2023, during daily walks with our dog Lulu, I began noticing how nature was quietly overtaking the built environment around me. Walls and masonry supports were being transformed by mold, lichen and oxidation. These weren’t ruins, but living surfaces—muscular grids mutating slowly, inexorably, and unconsciously. They evoked a poetic tension between intent and entropy, image and object, permanence and change. Recently, I’ve started thinking that painting is like a caste system: a small portion of it’s mass is the actual painted image, while the majority is made up of supporting roles: canvas, staples, stretcher, even the wall it hangs on. By revealing the actual wall behind the rendition of a wall, extending the canvas beyond the frame, peeling canvas back, etc., I’m wondering how an object can be self-aware and changeable, and like Samuel Beckett’s plays, are showing all their cards.

Artwork