We are so very excited to announce the opening of our next exhibition: DAZZLING GLEAM by FEATHER CHIAVERINI which opens on Friday, October 30th with a reception with the artist from 5-8PM.

FEATHER CHIAVERINI is a fiber and performance artist from South Florida currently based in Philadelphia, PA. He explores how queer theory, horror, class, and pop culture shape our identities and how these tools can be used flexibly to shape the self. Inspired by the theater and everyday hustle of his family’s costume shop, he uses costumes as material rather than adornment, creating immersive installations, soft sculptures, and digital environments.

Chiaverini received a BFA from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, MI, and an MFA from Temple University Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, PA. He has shown his work nationally at 2nd Story Gallery, Cannon Ball Arts, 2x Grizzly, Blah Blah Gallery, James Oliver Gallery, Trout Museum of Art, N’namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Ice Box Project Space, and more. He has taught classes at Rhode Island School of Design, Oxbow School of Art, and currently adjuncts at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, where he is also the Residency Director of the Queer Materials Lab.

In Feather’s own words…
My father runs a costume shop, my mother was an actress, and my grandfather was a clown. I have every dream of being performative.

I explore how horror, queerness, class, and pop culture can be used flexibly to shape identity. Inspired by devised theater techniques and the everyday labor of my family, I treat costumes not as adornment but as material. Through immersive installations, soft sculptures, and digital environments, I build spaces where identity is unstable and focused on collective being.

Frustrated by the demand to solidify the self. Instead, I ask: where do we go when we wear a costume? Costumes function like gossip, they carry memory multiplicity, and a folkloric knowledge of what not to do. They hold traces of past bodies while projecting bodies that have yet to arrive. In this way, they operate as both archive and speculation.

Working with found materials, feathers from General Motors Equipment, fabric from a costume shop floor, and trash from a party, I embrace a language of craft, repair, and excess. These materials carry class, labor, and failure within them. Costumes pile, sag, and accumulate into sculptural hoards: wracks, heaps, that mimic the costume shop floor. Within these accumulations, individual objects never fully disappear but instead contribute to a larger mass of imagined bodies, like a chorus line, a protest, or a party.

My work sits in the tension between gay assimilation and queer futurity. I am particularly interested in the hardened, idealized body produced by capitalism, and how it might be softened, complicated, or undone. Through humor, theatricality, and compassionate critique, I construct exaggerated bodies and environments that expose both the pleasure and violence embedded in these forms.

I am drawn to what happens before and after performance: the dressing room, the rack, the shop floor. These are spaces of potential, where transformation is imagined but not yet fixed. They are sites of rehearsal, of trying on, failing, and becoming.

I don’t aim to perfect. I aim to play, to fail, and to imagine bodies that do not yet exist but insist on arriving.