Press: Art Viewer Daily LazyOccupying piccalilli simultaneously across two solo exhibitions, Back of House by Chaney Diao and Front of House by Juliusz Grabianski each construct staged environments in which bodies, objects and viewers become implicated within shifting structures of control, performance and spectatorship. In both exhibitions, mediated erotic imagery, staged domestic settings, synthetic bodily substances and scripted social encounters produce a landscape of constructed experience. Relations between performer and audience, viewer and viewed, server and consumer continuously collapse and intersect. Back of House brings together photography and moving image works made across different moments of Chaney’s practice. The photographic works begin with found pornographic images of bodies that are often denied agency or reduced to passive skin surfaces. These images are spun, projected and re-recorded through references to the spinning rhythms of high-speed techno, while distant and partially obscured dialogue drawn from behind-the-scenes dungeon-play pornographic material circulates through the video work. The exhibition offers a critical framework to access domestic interiors and rave conditions as familiar structures through which bodies, behaviours and relations are charged by shifts in tone, scale, framing and access.
My practice examines how identity is produced, performed and made legible through space, appearance and social relations. Working across moving image, installation, sculpture, sound, performance and digital media, I explore questions of being, belonging and individual agency as shaped by systems of regulation, projection and perception that often sit beyond one’s control. Informed by lived discomfort, my work moves between public space, subcultural environments, domestic interiors and speculative worlds, often unfolding through aesthetics of pressure, extremity and pain. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from BDSM, rave and club subcultures, as well as DJ mixing, I explore how established structures of power can be disrupted and reconfigured through pleasure, consent and intensity.
In 2025, Chaney was selected as an awardee of the third edition of LOEWE FOUNDATION/Studio Voltaire award. Selected exhibitions and performances include Back of House/Front of House, Piccalilli Gallery, London (2026), FAN の BLOG 迷妹の部屋, Asymmetry Art Foundation, London (2024), How to Destroy Angels (curated by Tai Shani & Anne Duffau), Horse Hospital, London (2024), Acal Festival 3 (curated by Studio/Chapple and SON OF CRAFT), Staffordshire St Gallery, London (2023), if splash has your whistle, IKLECTIK, London, (2023) and Kaugummi im Motherboard, gr_und Gallery, Berlin, (2024).