My work moves between photography and painting to explore how experiences of memory and violence leave traces on the body. I am interested in what remains after encounters with violence, social expectation, and predation. These experiences leave invisible impressions that are carried within us over time. Rather than depicting specific events, I investigate the emotional and psychological aftermath that lingers.
The figures occupy an unstable space between exposure and disappearance. Limbs fragment, bodies dissolve, and surfaces appear scorched or calcified, as though subjected to intense forces. They evoke the sensation of being placed inside a kiln, hardened, brittle, and on the verge of turning to ash. Dismembered extremities and partial bodies emerge as fragments of memory, reflecting the way lived experience can return through sensation, imagery, and the body itself. The body carries what cannot always be spoken, holding experiences that continue to shape perception.
My practice originates from recurring nightmares and intrusive imagery. Rather than resisting these hauntings, I have come to understand them as a form of psychological excavation. Through making, I transform disturbing internal images into physical form. The work is not concerned with recreating specific moments, but with giving shape to the feelings, sensations, and memories that persist afterward.
My process creates layered surfaces that evoke clay, scorched skin, and weathered flesh, where the photographic image shifts between representation and material presence. Within painting, the acrylic washes are allowed to bleed, stain, and settle unpredictably, allowing chance and material transformation to shape each surface. By relinquishing a degree of control, I allow the materials themselves to participate in the transformation, creating bodies that reveal what we emotionally carry.
The body in my work becomes a place where experiences of care, violence, desire, rejection, and social expectation converge. These accumulated experiences shape one’s relationship to intimacy, vulnerability, and self-perception over time. Through photography and painting, I seek to give physical form to these invisible experiences.
René Chandler (b. Sydney, AU) is an interdisciplinary artist working in New York, New York, since 2010.
In 2009, she earned a Master’s degree in Film (Animation) from the Victorian College of the Arts at The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
EXHIBITIONS, FILM FESTIVALS, AWARDS, PUBLICATIONS
Ember Health Group Exhibit, Ember Health, New York 2025
Correspondence: circulation, collaboration, and community, Baxter St Camera Club 2024
The Big Bouquet, Blackstone Vainberg 2024
Ketamine, Ember Health, New York 2024
Creatives Rebuild New York Grant 2021
Crying Tears and Their Traces, Rox Gallery 2016
Honorable Mention Global Ebook Awards | Butterfly Hands Children’s ebook 2016
Women In Film | Magazine Publication 2015
Digital Picture Script Writing Awards - Only for Appointment Illustrated Animation 2009
South Texas Underground Film Festival 2015
Greek-Australian Short Film Festival 2015
Corfu Animation Festival 2015
Manchester International Short Film & Animation Festival 2015
Melbourne International Animation Festival 2010
Sydney Underground Film Festival 2010, 2015
Montreal International Animation Film Festival 2010
Digital Picture Script Writing Awards - Only for Appointment Illustrated Animation 2009
