Chloe Wise: ‘I’m trying to put all of these things into a mishmash soup’

Chloe Wise’s first major institutional exhibition in Switzerland is, by design, difficult to discuss. Curated by Samuel Leuenberger, Extrasensory at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger takes its title from “extrasensory perception”—another phrase for the supernatural sixth sense. The show’s topic, Wise says, “evades definition at every turn”.

Wise approaches her slippery subject by way of recognisable tropes borrowed from a wide gamut of sources including science fiction, consumer culture, organised religion and art history. The genres and traditions that the show brings together often seem incongruous or conflicting. Wise finds common ground between them as the various tools and analogies with which we might access and explain the unexplainable.

Best known for her subtly staged paintings of friends in scenes of performative leisure, the Canadian artist has eschewed painting entirely for this exhibition, which is conceived as a multichannel video and immersive installation.

The Art Newspaper: You have said in the past that you believe in aliens, but not necessarily as the little green men that we tend to imagine. Do you think this exhibition goes some way to give a form to your idea of what might be “out there”?

Chloe Wise: The answer is that it defies answers. It’s like the book Flatland [by Edwin A. Abbott, a satirical novella in which a square, living in a two-dimensional world, struggles to conceptualise a three-dimensional object]. We’re using language to approach something that is unapproachable. In the exhibition I’m saying: “Take all these different fragments of an explanation that people feel and believe to be true. Take all of belief and combine it.”

The show opens with an installation resembling a gift shop. Why did you choose this for an initial entry point?

I love the idea that, accessing something really profound and ineffable, the initial contact is through a tchotchke [trinket]. I’m posing the question: where can we find the parallels between divinity, religion—however you want to define it—questions of the cosmos, questions of consciousness, questions of non-human intelligence? A lot of people access these things through consumer items: a bible, prayer beads, a tarot deck, a T-shirt that says “I want to believe”. I’m conflating all of these signifiers, as I do across the exhibition.

As an artist known primarily for painting, this show marks an ambitious departure into installation. What contributed to this change?

I’ve done a lot of installation. I’ve been making installations and videos for 10 years, but it doesn’t get as much visibility as my paintings. When I do a painting show, you have to stop me from trying to make it into an installation show. It’s not a huge departure, but it’s an opportunity where I was given such a beautiful permission to just go for it in this way. I’m doing what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I hate the word “immersive” because it makes it sound like a Van Gogh immersive experience or something, but I’m trying to create worlds.

I have often recognised faces in your paintings—art people or cultural figures who you know. Do you think of these figures as playing characters, or are they appearing as themselves?

They’re playing characters; it’s all trope. For example, the first scene is a world of male angels. It’s like a Tiepolo fresco, with beautiful angels suspended, but it’s [the actor] Bobbi Menuez, [the writer] Joey Frank, [or the musician] Moses Sumney playing angel versions of themselves. My work is always involved with artifice. It’s always thinking about presentation and performance. Even if I paint myself, it’s not about rawness and realness. It’s a version; it’s aware of itself as a painting.

Painting is mostly a solitary pursuit. Producing a show like this must have involved a huge amount of collaboration. How did the experience of making this exhibition differ from your usual studio routine? Did it impact your approach to the work?

This is a 70-person team. It’s really something. I’m a very social person. I love people, I’m constantly curious and interested in people. As a painter, I paint people—but I’m alone all day. As a director and collaborator, I don’t let anybody just do their job. I’m working on every single part of the production. Being a painter, I can’t let go of control over every single aspect.

The ideas that come through here, I couldn’t have reached through painting alone. This is why I love directing: it’s like painting with people. You walk into a room and you’re like: “The only point of today is to get my vision across, out of me, without a paintbrush. Let’s go.”

The exhibition’s aesthetic seems to be intentionally incoherent, moving quickly from very high culture to very low culture—serious to silly. Was this always the ambition?

I’m not trying to show some multidimensional godlike creature or being. I don’t know how to do that. What I do know how to do is point to sci-fi, point to the Bible, point to paintings of angels in museums, point to a cult documentary, point to a Halloween costume of a sexy devil. I’m trying to put all of these things into a mishmash soup to get to the truth but the point is that language fails. I fail at showing you what I think it might be, because I can’t articulate it.

All aspects of belief, phenomena, divinity—those are incalculable and unapproachable. So, I’m approaching it from the only level that I have access to, which is painting, film, trope and genre. I’m going to be talking about this topic in my work for decades. This is my starting point. Who knows what I do next?

• Chloe Wise: Extrasensory, Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, until 6 September