Humor has always been Chloe Wise‘s sharpest critical tool. Across painting, sculpture, film, and installation, the Canadian artist has built a practice that is as funny as it is unsettling, using wit to probe the belief systems, desires, and contradictions that shape contemporary life. For Extrasensory, created for Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (KBH.G) in Basel, Wise turns her attention to one of humanity’s oldest obsessions: the search for meaning in the unexplainable.
At the heart of the exhibition is a three-channel film that unfolds like Twin Peaks meets The X-Files inside a Chloe Wise painting come to life, with the supernatural vibes of Stranger Things on a Victoria’s Secret set. Presented alongside an uncanny Green Room and a fictional gift shop, Extrasensory explores the porous boundaries between religion, UFO mythology, commodity culture, and the human impulse to believe. Rather than offering answers, Wise embraces ambiguity, inviting viewers into a world where language breaks down, narratives loop back on themselves, and meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach.
“The dog died again.” “I want world peace, but for myself.” “The body is a situation.” Wise’s latest work is filled with sentences that sound absurd, funny, and strangely familiar—until they start revealing something about the way we think. Repeat a word often enough and it loses its meaning. Repeat a story often enough and it starts to feel true. In conversation with Anika Meier for SLEEK, Wise discusses why language breaks down, why lovers can end up speaking entirely different languages, and how the things we can’t explain often become the ones we can’t stop thinking about.
ANIKA MEIER Chloe, we’re sitting in the Green Room of your exhibition Extrasensory. It reminds me of the Red Room in Twin Peaks.
CHLOE WISE Twin Peaks is one of my main touchpoints of inspiration. This room definitely has a Lynchian quality. It feels like a dressing room backstage at a theatre, or a vanity mirror where a drag queen gets ready before going on stage. It can also feel like a carnival ride, a UFO that’s about to take off, or a place of worship or divinity. Everything feels like it’s about to happen. At the same time, it is, quite literally, a space for reflection.
As part of Extrasensory, it’s a space between commodity and experience. The film speaks about, but also emulates, what it feels like to have a fractured, poetic, nonlinear, dreamlike experience, whether that’s a religious experience, an encounter with the beyond, or something like the UFO phenomenon. Then you enter this space of reflection and ask yourself, “What was that?” The experience isn’t in your hands anymore. It’s no longer tangible. There’s an absence.
Then there’s the commodity. So much of the way we interact with things is through symbols: the sign, the signifier, the bumper sticker, the keychain, the T-shirt. It’s like, “I had a religious experience and all I got was this shitty T-shirt.”
AM It’s also an infinity room. When you look at yourself in the mirrors, your reflection seems to be endlessly replicated.
CW The idea of infinity is part of what you could call the ineffable. Extrasensory is about what we can’t quite get close to: the beyond, something bigger and mysterious. Infinity is one of those things your brain just can’t compute. There’s an impossibility to it, but also a longing to understand.
AM The film itself explores repetition and the impossibility of grasping life and belief.
CW Repetition is one of the ways belief gets created. You repeat a story, a mythology, an archetype, a character. You say something enough times and it becomes true, whether in politics or belief systems.
People who have religious or UFO experiences often start noticing things: angel numbers everywhere, signs, the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. This kind of recognition and repetition is also dreamlike.
Repetition can also make something lose its meaning. When you say the word “pillow” over and over—pillow, pillow, pillow—it suddenly doesn’t even feel like a word anymore. Then you say it one more time and it becomes funny.
AM One sentence that repeats throughout the three-channel installation is: “I want world peace but for myself.”
CW All of those sentences in the film have different significations. It’s about removing them from meaning and playing promiscuously with language. You try to understand them, and you kind of can’t. But they’re also not nonsensical. You could imagine someone saying them.
Take, “I want world peace for myself.” It’s so selfish. But sometimes I just want world peace for me. I want to have world peace. Can I just have peace in my world?
AM You come from painting. You’re internationally known for portraying your New York circle of friends.
CW That’s what stands out. I’m trying to wrestle myself away from being, like, “Yeah, I paint my friends.” Who else am I going to paint? That’s who’s around.
AM Are you annoyed by that image of the painter who makes portraits of her New York circle of friends?
CW I’ve been making videos for more than ten years. Throughout my work, I’ve played with bizarre archetypes and humour. But everyone remembers the painting of someone they recognised online.
Then again, I’m someone people recognise from online. They’re my peers. People recognise me from online whether they know my work or not. We all have these windows into each other. You’re never going to get to the truth of a person.
By the way, this film is paintings of people too. It’s a clear connection.
AM The movie feels like Twin Peaks meets The X-Files in a Chloe Wise painting come to life, with the supernatural vibes of Stranger Things on a Victoria’s Secret set.
CW That’s accurate. In a way, this film is the biggest painting I’ve ever made—my most dynamic painting. It has the same qualities as my paintings. I take people who inspire me, whether they’re my friends or not, and place them in an environment. I love the performativity of that. Nothing is natural. Even when something appears natural, it’s really a performance of naturalness. It’s all artifice.
Making a film felt like a natural progression because I’ve been making films for ten years. I also made a film at Parcours three years ago with the same curator, Samuel Leuenberger.
Video is my most complete medium. It’s the complete package of what I want to put out into the world. It has the humour, the dialogue, the voice, the sound, the layers, the visuals, the wind, the music, the dance. As an artist, it’s my fullest expression. It’s more fulfilling than a painting can be, even though I love painting. Painting is simply the easiest thing for people to recognise.
AM Do you think people might be more interested in the paintings because they’re easier for the market?
CW Painting is much more marketable. I didn’t have to think about the market for a second when I made this work.
Painting is so solitary, whereas filmmaking is the most collaborative thing. I couldn’t have made any of this without the amazing people I worked with, my producers Rachel Walden and Gummy Productions. Making a three-channel film with seven interconnected stories takes an enormous number of people.
AM How did you approach working on such an ambitious project that combines installation and filmmaking?
CW I’d been thinking about it for two years. I always knew I wanted to make a work about “angels = aliens?” and explore the parallels between divinity, UFOs, and belief.
The UFO phenomenon can’t be approached from a single perspective. You can’t just look at what the U.S. government or the military is telling you. You can’t just listen to people who say they’ve experienced abductions. Neither of those offers an absolute truth. You have to approach it from different perspectives. That also means including its representation in film, the religious dimension and all of its strange contradictions.
The whole UFO phenomenon is fragmented. It’s trickster-ish. Religion is similar. I’m not religious, but religion is also about faith. You have to trust it. It’s not necessarily going to make sense. Faith is intuitive and nonlinear. You can’t fully make sense of it.
I wanted to make something you can’t quite make sense of, even though you keep trying. You think, I heard that line twice. That’s connected to that. Maybe I can make this make sense. But it keeps slipping away. It evades definition, just as the phenomenon itself does.
To make artwork about it, I didn’t want to simply paint people with angel wings or people who had seen a UFO. I wanted to talk about the actual experience, the ontological loops you go through.
You also can’t separate that experience from commodity culture, which is why there had to be the commodity room. The exhibition needed all three stages: the physical experience, then the reflective space of absence, and finally the commodity. After watching the film, you’re left asking yourself: What just happened to me?
AM The exhibition moves between faith, conspiracy, science, and fiction. What can art do that these other ways of explaining the world can’t?
CW It’s important to approach the UFO phenomenon as an artist because there’s a freedom that scientists don’t necessarily have. There’s still a stigma around it, even if the conversation has become a little less stigmatised in recent years.
To talk about this topic, you have to be willing to ask really weird, fucked-up questions because the phenomenon itself resists easy explanation. The inability of the scientific establishment, the media and governments to openly engage with it makes it difficult to make progress. If you’re a scientist or a theoretical physicist and people think you’re crazy for asking these questions, how are you going to get funding to do the research?
Even the parts that aren’t true are part of it. Fiction is part of it. Someone might be having visions during a mental health crisis, for example. Those experiences are part of the phenomenon too because the UFO phenomenon also has psychological effects.
Think of the Navy pilots with top-secret security clearances who report seeing UFOs. When they talk about it, they’re genuinely scared. They describe something that seemed to defy physics, moved at impossible speeds, felt sentient, knew where they were. Whether or not that’s what’s happening, that’s their experience.
You can’t simply dismiss these experiences because then you cut away half of the phenomenon. Whether it’s a farmer who sees an orb in the sky or a pilot reporting something inexplicable, the question remains: what do we do with experiences that don’t fit our existing explanations?
What if it’s not physical? What if it’s biological? The point is that you have to be able to ask those questions, and art is the perfect place to do that. For me, this is actually a truer way of discussing the phenomenon than many conferences or academic settings. You need a space for art, poetry and dreamlike thinking to look at this phenomenon without judgment.
AM You’re careful not to claim that UFOs are aliens. Why is that distinction important to you?
CW UFOs mean there’s something unknown flying around. We don’t know what it is. Something unknown has been part of human experience for a very long time. We’ve just called it different things. In different religious epochs, we might have called it gods or angels. We’re in a technological epoch, so we think in terms of UFOs. Maybe in the future, when consciousness rather than physical bodies becomes the framework, we’ll talk about it in completely different terms.
When you zoom out, all of these fantastical stories that sound so crazy begin to form a pattern. Not because they’re necessarily true. I actually think we have to let go of the idea of truth. If something defies our understanding of physics, then we need a whole new set of tools, a new language, new ways of measuring and describing it.
That’s why so much of my work is about language breaking down. Something is happening. There’s a phenomenon. That’s why we have religion, and that’s why we have science fiction. We’re all just looking up at the sky, trying to make sense of something we can’t make sense of, because we’re human.
AM What first drew you to the UFO phenomenon?
CW I’ve been thinking about it for six or seven years. I actually think almost every line of inquiry ends up there. If you’re interested in philosophy or the nature of reality, it happens quite naturally.
For me, it started with questions around quantum physics and the nature of reality. You realise that on the subatomic level it’s all mystery. Then you zoom out and the universe is just as mysterious. Black holes, time and space folding in on themselves, time not being linear. The moment someone tells you time isn’t linear, you’re like, wait. Every year I have another birthday and then I die. It suddenly opens the door to all these other questions.
Since 2017, the conversation has also changed. The New York Times article and the U.S. government’s disclosures legitimised the topic in a new way. Suddenly, you didn’t have to look very far to find serious conversations about it.
What interests me isn’t really UFOs themselves. It’s bigger-than-us questions. When you hear an unexplained story, how could you not want to know more? Everywhere you turn, there’s another thread to follow.
I read across all these different fields: biocentrism, accounts of UFO experiences, the history of religion and how religions were formed. I’m not trying to solve anything. As the years go by, though, you start to see interesting intersections.
That’s what this film tries to reproduce. There’s a religious way of looking at it. A cinematic way. A scientific way. It’s a hyperobject. There isn’t one perspective that gives you complete access to understanding it.
I try to create a space without judgment. I just want to listen, read, observe and remain radically open to whatever the truth might be. I’m not interested in saying, “That sounds crazy, so it can’t be true.” I’d love to have people sit together in this room and simply tell their stories.
AM One story the protagonists in your film keep telling each other is that a dog has died.
CW Dog is God backwards. And God is dead. I don’t want to overexplain it. How could a dog die again? Right away you’re thinking about reincarnation.
I have this scroll in my phone that I’ve been adding to for about ten years. I collect lines: something someone says, something I overhear, a typo, a lyric from a song. A lot of the dialogue in the film comes from that notebook.
One of the most important lines, “Enter into pure uselessness,” which gets sung and repeated throughout the film, comes from Jameson Webster’s contribution.
AM You also touch on questions of gender. One line from the film that stayed with me is, “A woman is a complicated business.”
CW It’s about language failing, but it’s also about men not understanding women. The line comes from the dialogue between a man and an alien woman who are in a relationship.
I wanted their conversations to make sense. They feel like conversations from a movie you recognise. “Don’t you remember how we used to be?” “Yes, my darling, I remember.” But at the same time, I wanted them to completely break down. You’re left thinking: what are they talking about?
Take the line about the eyes. “The baby has my eyes.” It makes no sense. She’s saying, “Don’t you see?” and he’s like, “What do you mean? Everything’s fine.”
In the memories, everything was already strange, but he never recognised it. She was always an alien. He asks, “Where are you from? Switzerland?” and she’s trying to tell him she’s from somewhere much farther away. He just doesn’t get it.
When they’re in love, they’re speaking this fragmented, poetic, dreamlike language. That’s actually something I love about Twin Peaks and the Red Room. You hear lines like, “That gum you like is going to come back in style.” The sentences don’t really make sense, but somehow they make perfect sense.
That’s what the lovers have in common. They connect through that strange, dreamlike language. But as soon as they start talking about practical things, like, “Can I come with you?” they stop understanding each other.
Just like Satan and all the other characters in the film, everyone is trying to get somewhere else. In Alien Mojo, the UFO arrives outside the window and it’s like, “There’s a better universe next door. Let’s go.” Satan wants to get back to hell, where his ex-wife is. The kids in the cult want to ascend. Everyone is looking beyond this world.
It’s really about that off-world impulse. What else is out there? Where can we go next?
I also think it’s about terrestrial anxiety. Earth is a scary place right now. “This planet is a mess” is another line from the film. That’s funny, and then it’s sad. The more you repeat it, the truer it becomes—until it starts to lose meaning again.
AM “The body is a situation.”
CW Then it also breaks into lines like, “The body is a hell of a good prison cell,” “The body is a situation,” or “An ideal pebble in a perfect pond.”
I’d been collecting these lines in my phone for years. When I made the film, I didn’t write a script. I just trusted that it would come together. I kept returning to certain lines intuitively.
“The dog died again” was also the easiest line for everyone to remember. Some of the others were harder. I’d say, “This planet is a mess,” and people would get it wrong. But everybody remembered, “The dog died again.” That’s probably why it’s become the line everyone asks me about. If it sticks with you, then it’s doing something right.
For me, “An ideal pebble in a perfect pond” is one of the most important lines. It’s about how unfathomably rare it is to be embodied. Life itself is such an improbable event. The body is just a temporary situation. It’s the perfect conditions coming together for you to exist, but not forever.
Now I’m overexplaining it. The lines work better as poetry. I could write an essay about every one of them, but I’d rather leave them open.
AM You often talk about experience rather than narrative. Is that also how you approached the structure of the film?
CW I never went to film school, so I don’t really know where this structure comes from. It’s just how I make videos.
I think of it as a bracelet with different beads or charms. You can come in at any point, hold on to one of them, and it will carry you through. You could rearrange the bracelet in any direction and it would still work.
The idea is that people can walk in at any moment and immediately feel addressed. You haven’t just walked in on someone else’s story. The work is speaking to you. There isn’t a wrong way to experience it.
AM Did you know from the beginning that people would enter through something that looks like a gift shop?
CW When you go back into that room after watching the film, you start noticing all the little inside jokes. It’s the same feeling as having an experience you can’t explain. You’re like, “I don’t really know what happened in there. There were angels, there were aliens. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”
Then all you’re left with is the object. In the exhibition you can’t actually take anything with you, but hypothetically you’d have a keychain or a souvenir. It would be this cheap, shitty object that’s only meaningful because you know what it refers to. It’s like an inside joke, or a religious token.
I was already thinking about the merchandise for each part of the exhibition. At one point I even considered making this room orange, like the cult room. But that would have privileged the cult too much, and I didn’t want one storyline to feel more important than the others.
If I were to remake the exhibition and had more rooms, I’d probably create one for each character, each with its own objects. But I’d also mix them up because I don’t want it to feel tied to one religion. I’m not interested in any particular religion. I’m interested in the structures of belief.
AM What role does religion play in the film?
CW I’m not religious. But I love religious history. I love mythology, especially Greek mythology. I’m Jewish, but my work isn’t driven by religion.
I’m open. I’m open to science, to New Age ideas, to weird Burning Man shit, to astrology, to whatever makes sense on a given day. I’m not pretending to know the answer. I don’t have a fixed belief system.
What I do believe in is belief itself. I believe in the power of collective belief—whether that’s capitalism, Hollywood, religion, UFOs or any other system. Once enough people believe in something, it becomes real in its effects.
Commodity culture is a good example. Even if I don’t personally believe in money or the exchange of goods, I believe that most people do, and that makes it real. Objects become vessels for belief. That’s one reason I’m so interested in commodity culture. I think belief is often articulated through objects.
AM Was it clear from the beginning that visitors wouldn’t be able to take anything home?
CW If this hadn’t been a nonprofit institution, I would have loved that.
I actually made a hundred hats myself. I wanted to make T-shirts too. I already have the designs. They’re these great sci-fi T-shirts with me and the alien, inspired by the Blue Velvet promotional shirt. They say “PsyFi.” I made the design, but we never put them into production. I’d love to make them and sell them when I do the New York version.
I made hats that simply say “PsyFi.” Maybe they should have said Extrasensory, but PsyFi is the film.
Who doesn’t want to wear a hat that says “PsyFi”?
I love the idea of people walking around carrying a symbol before they’ve even experienced the work. It’s the first introduction. You see someone wearing a cross necklace and you wonder, “What does that mean?” Then you have to go and experience it for yourself.