Claire Chambless Spleen

Morán Morán is thrilled to present Spleen, Claire Chambless’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Founded in reference to Baudelaire’s usage of “spleen” in his anthology of poems Les Fleurs du Mal as a dialectical symbol between beauty and decay, ecstasy and despair, Chambless probes these as psychic phenomena within the exhibition. Here, the spleen behaves as a starting point for a journey into inner darkness, asking us as viewers to undergo an integration of our own shadow parts and bring them into the light. It is in this process of Jungian introspection that we might find how we divide light and shadow itself to be suspect.

Claire Chambless’s practice explores the unstable terrain where contradiction such as this resides—where opposing truths might not only coexist but inform one another. Central to this inquiry is her use of dollhouses, which serve less as nostalgic objects and more as psychological architectures. By reimagining their interiors and facades, Chambless transforms these miniature structures into symbolic landscapes of the psyche—spaces where light and shadow, public persona and private self, merge and unsettle one another. Building upon this body of work, Chambless has further pushed the mediums and forms these dollhouses take, from fragmenting free-standing sculpture to wall-mounted extrusions. This tension is mirrored in her material choices. Found objects blend seamlessly with handmade components, blurring the boundary between what is constructed and what is inherited. Similarly, the pristine fantasy world of the dollhouse is undercut by an undercurrent of corporeality—flesh, bone, and the visceral weight of lived experience seeping through the cracks of an otherwise idealized form.

Chambless’s exploration is rooted in the formative stages of human development, when dichotomies—true and false, good and bad, inside and outside—begin to shape our understanding of reality. In rumbling, large scale slatted works or petite black-latex coated tableaus, there’s a suggestion that these early, rigid frameworks continue to haunt the adult self. Together, these works signal the lingering effects of compartmentalization, the futile attempts to neatly divide the self into digestible parts.

In this fragmentation, we sense a deeper commentary: that these emotional, psychological, and architectural partitions are symptoms of a desire for order in the face of inner chaos, a yearning for rootedness that ultimately denies the dynamic, relational nature of identity. Rather than seeking clarity or singular truths, Chambless invites viewers to inhabit complexity, opacity, and the porous boundaries between self and environment, light and shadow—an approach that feels increasingly urgent in the fragmented landscape of contemporary life.

Claire Chambless (b.1989 Houston, TX) lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture. Her most recent research centers on the ways haunting and cultural melancholia are sublimated into ecstatic experiences, ranging from the religious to the psychedelic. Chambless received her BA at Davidson College and her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. Her work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; and the Bunker, Palm Beach. Her work has been featured in Artforum online, Artillery, LA Weekly, The Art Newspaper, Cultured Magazine, WhiteWall, Galerie, among others.