Imagining non-binary ways of being in domestic and public space is on the periphery of how the architectural profession currently thinks about space. In their first UK solo show, Now I’m home, lips that know my name, Philadelphia based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase shares a heartfelt glimpse into black queerness in the city, with intimacy and vulnerability. Exploring everyday spaces, architectural motifs are appropriated, stretched, contorted, and repeated to take on new connotations.



The show centres around a single room, at the heart of which lies a large red timber installation house, with cut-out windows offering views through to the thirteen large scale surrounding paintings that line the gallery walls. Bricks are crudely painted onto its exterior, piles of men’s underwear, Nike trainer boxers, and lipstick-stained tissues scattered around the red room, there is a roughness to the installation that contrasts with the tenderness depicted in the figurative work.

The paintings blend into the surreal, with bodies becoming so entangled that the individuals are lost. Using motifs from domestic space, the work is able to move from scene to scene – the familiarity of sofas, vases, watches, and even kitchen utensils now all taking on new meanings to that which we might instinctively associate. The world we are invited to enter feels like one of many queertopias, where images of domestic scenes depicted ways of living architecture has traditionally not designed for, nor understood.



Through placing a house at the centre of the show, but stripping it of everything but the bedroom, ideas of public/private are felt throughout the collection of paintings, collages, and video installation. The central gallery is curated to feel distinctly civic, with colourful wooden benches that feature cut out portrait silhouettes creating the sense of a public square, pushing the deeply intimate paintings out into this very public arena. The artist references this in some of their mixed media pieces, where photographs of a streetscapes and a cut out from a men’s barber catalogue are collaged into the work.

The elements of the black queer experience to build a notion of love, sex, pleasure, and space – one that feels very much to have spawned from existing outside of the exhibition – it does however feel like an intentional invitation into this world. And, it feels like an invitation that is deeply autobiographical, rooted in the happening of people and place, where the point of convergence between the two becomes the point at which a snapshot of is taken. Rarely is love and sex put together so tenderly.

The exhibition provides visions of narratives outside of the binary. There’s a distinct feeling, that the mythologies we live our lives by do not exist in this world. Where love is not happily ever after, but something which is more present set within a backdrop of spaces appropriated to cultivate this. In this work, there is something the architectural profession can both learn from, as well as learn to acknowledge. Here, private and public spaces are played upon and reflected back to us with a queer and black splendour.