Chloe Roth: CLAIM DENIED
Chloe’s work explores the challenges of dealing with the health insurance industry while living with genetic conditions that require symptom and pain management. The works reflect the toll of navigating an opaque bureaucracy that prioritizes profit over patient and reduces the physical realities of chronic illness to mere data points and denial codes.
From the constraints and burden of pain management, she has developed an almost obsessive and repetitive style of art-making. For this show, she made 25 hand-sewn hats (repurposed LA Dodgers hats), 25 embroidered wall hangings, a series of cyanotypes of her x-rays, and collaged manifestos made from all the letters she’s ever received from Blue Shield—all in between making hundreds of paintings and textile pieces of Outer Sunset houses, basketballs, and sneakers. Pain has shown up in her practice through this repetition and as part of her daily lived experience. For the first time she is sharing images of her spine, distorted by scoliosis. Humor is also a part of Chloe’s coping and art-making: the heavy subject of Luigi Mangioni is transformed through self-conscious kitsch; for her he represents the frustration and anguish that can’t be politically relieved in our completely captured capitalist (interchangeable with fascist or corporatist) reality and the large-scale violence perpetrated on all of us by the “health care” system.
“Love it or loathe it, the tension between individual suffering and systemic indifference was recently brought to collective consciousness by one particularly handsome young man. Did he unite the proletariat? Who can say? But I united 25 of my favorite local artists to contribute pieces on the subjects of illness, disability, healthcare, insurance, Luigi, and what it means to have a body during late-stage capitalism/early-stage fascism.” — Chloe Roth
