We were lucky to catch up with Chantal Lesley recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Chantal thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

My work tends to be very autobiographical, I like to make work that finds unique ways to retell stories of my own personal and familial experiences. At first, being this vulnerable and public with my work was intimidating, but hearing the responses I’ve had from others with similar stories that have never seen it represented in a gallery setting, it gave me the confidence I needed to continue making my work and I knew it was important for it to be seen. A project that really kickstarted that for me was “Anything but Brown”, It’s a series of five photos where I progressively cover myself in baby powder, a ritual I would partake in as a child realizing that my brown skin was not portrayed as beautiful in the media, and thinking I could not be beautiful unless my skin was fair. The title came from a conversation I had at 19 years old with a former roommate where she shared her disgust with the color brown and it immediately brought that same shameful feeling I had as a child. I feel that this work is not only performance, but also plays with time as it is something that originally occurred when I was a child, reinforced when I was just coming into early adulthood, and finally created in my early 30s, and to have an audience that resonated so much with it made me question if much has actually changed throughout my lifetime.

My artistic process is very intuitive, I tend not to second guess myself and trust that whatever is coming to me needs to be made. At times after I’m able to sit with my work and reflect on it, will it come together and make sense to me. For example, my project En Medio de la Nostalgia, was a project where I was researching my family archive and really looking inward. At first I was just looking through my family archive, reflecting on my parents immigration story, and making photos in reaction to being a first generation American. Once I was able to detach myself from the work and reflect on it, I could see themes appear, and why I chose certain colors although at first just intuitively, ended up being very purposeful.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a multidisciplinary artist, living and working in Austin, TX. I was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley, specifically Brownsville, which is located at southern tip of Texas along the Mexico border. I’m a first generation American, with my parents being born and raised in Germany and Peru. Most of my childhood summers were spent in Peru visiting family, and I grew up in a time where the only method of communication for my mom and her family were through letters and packages that took weeks to arrive. Scheduling phone calls were necessary or else she would miss an opportunity to speak to someone for weeks on end. I remember assisting my mom in making videos for my family in Peru, waving and speaking to a camera imagining they were a relative.

As far as what brought me to photography, my dad was a bit of an untrained artist. When I look back at my family archives, I see beautiful, well composed images, and I have vague memories of him projecting his photos of landscapes in our living room while Peruvian flute music accompanied them.

I had the stereotypical upbringing of being told that a career in art wasn’t possible. I naturally avoided pursuing art for as long as I could, and originally studied Business. But years went by, and I still felt completely unsatisfied. In retrospect, I was feeling the call to art, and I was at a point in my life where I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I didn’t take photography seriously until I started pursuing a BFA in Design and took photography as an elective to “get it out of my system”. At that point, my curiosity for art and photography was insatiable, and I knew I couldn’t deny my path as an artist any longer, and decided to also pursue a BFA in Photography as well.

Since graduating from Texas State University in 2021, I’ve continued an art practice and have had the pleasure of exhibiting throughout Texas and the United States. In 2022, I completed my first artist residency at LATITUDE, a nonprofit photo lab in Chicago, IL and also exhibited my first solo show En Medio de la Nostalgia, in Austin, TX.

In terms of what keeps me inspired, I stay inspired by my multicultural upbringing, I love making work that blends my cultures and finds the commonality among them, which I feel is like a metaphor for my siblings and I.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I made a huge pivot in my life when I finally decided to pursue art. Originally I studied Business and obtained a degree in Marketing, in the hopes of making my parents proud. And while I didn’t want to admit it at the time, in my core I could tell that I knew a creative life was for me. I felt very lost for a long time, until I felt like I had nothing left to lose and went back to school in my late 20s to pursue a Design degree. I didn’t know anything about design, but just knew I wanted to learn. It was a difficult but rewarding process to go back to school and be amongst my peers who were a decade younger than me and already so talented and already had years of art knowledge and access to resources under their belts while I was starting from scratch.

During the pursuit of my design degree, I took Photography as an elective, as it was something that interested me as a teen. After my first class, I was hooked. It was something I felt I was naturally good at, and I loved being able to tell a story through an image. I decided to pursue both Design and Photography even though it would prolong my graduation date by a year.

Although making that pivot was scary, and I had to battle imposter syndrome the whole way through, I’m happy to say that I now have a career in design and have been exhibiting my artwork since 2019.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I would say that I have very ambitious goals for my art career. I have a list of art career milestones that I work towards, and I always feel amazed and incredibly proud of myself when I’m able to cross one off. Recently I’ve been able to cross off being accepted to an international residency, as I was invited to be an artist in residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux in France in June of 2024.

I also have an insatiable curiosity and need to continue learning. I am constantly trying to evolve my practice and learn new ways to tell my stories. Right now I’m really interested in combining photography and fabric and combining the folk styles of my different cultures. I am also looking forward to taking an experimental film class in the future and find ways of integrating family archival videos into my practice.      

Contact Info:

• Website: chantallesley.com
• Instagram: chantallesley
• Other: https://www.gofundme.com/f/wk3hn-help-get-me-to-france?utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1&utm_content=undefined&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer&utm_term=undefined