Chloé Rager

An “impervious surface” is a term coined to name any hard area or surface in the built environment that prevents natural patterns of water infiltration, including roads, paved parking lots, rooftops, buildings or structures, sidewalks, driveways, etc.

Invoked in the context of these works, Impervious Surface becomes an archive of the city's hardened layers. Casts of industrial materials like asphalt, concrete, brick, and rebar—typically associated with control and authority—are reshaped and reimagined in sensual, chromatic, and bodily forms. Hardware relics from the machinery used to create these surfaces, cotton-candy-colored chunks of asphalt, and bricks recast to fold in on themselves offer a transformed and softened record of these spaces.

Two pigment prints of technicolor oil slicks on asphalt add to and contextualize the archive. These prints, softened and iridescent, wrinkle and fold within their frames, distorting the image of the hardened surfaces beneath us, creating an alternative, potentially pervious narrative of the built environment.