Chanel Khoury (b. 1998, Rhode Island) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Khoury earned her BFA from New York University in 2020, along with a degree in philosophy. Her paintings and sculptures explore notions of physiological adaptation and spirituality.

Chanel Khoury builds her artworks inside fully engineered digital systems of her own making. Drawing inspiration from sacred architecture, ancient holy sites, and the biology of deep-sea organisms, particularly comb jellies and siphonophores, her work explores the boundary between individuality and collective intelligence. These organisms, with their self-cloning and distributed structures, challenge conventional ideas of the self and inform Khoury’s conceptual framework.

Siphonophores are composed of genetically identical units that replicate, specialize, and function as a single distributed intelligence, while the comb jelly, among the oldest known organisms on Earth, appears uncannily pixelated, its iridescent body reading less like biology and more like a digital footprint. These biological systems serve as “seed data” for Khoury’s custom-built three-dimensional computational environments: infinite virtual landscapes constructed from the ground up, where geometry, structure, and spatial logic are authored at the level of code, surface, and light.

Within this digital ecosystem, Khoury engineers her own materials and surfaces using algorithmic construction, physically based rendering workflows, and custom-built shaders. She creates hybrid, reflective, and translucent substances—part mineral, part synthetic organism—designed to interact with virtual light in complex ways. Glitches and computational anomalies are embraced not as errors, but as emergent machine artifacts folded into the formal language of the work. Light itself becomes a programmable variable, calibrated either to historically specific solar data, such as the sun over Egypt at 9:30 a.m. in 1835, or generated synthetically through pixel-based skies and virtual light sources whose refractions ripple across surfaces. The sphere frequently appears as a central computational object: a pure geometric form reflecting both its environment and its own continuous transformation.

Once the virtual environment is fully realized, Khoury conducts extensive virtual capture sessions, generating hundreds of iterations across simulated camera positions and scales. From these outputs, she selects a single composition to translate into the physical world. Through months of meticulous hand-painting in oil, she reconstructs the digitally authored image with precision, effectively reverse-engineering a machine-generated world. The resulting works merge ancient references with futuristic aesthetics, creating a closed loop between biological, architectural, and computational systems, where the hand re-enacts a world first built by the machine.

By fully constructing her forms and materials within computational systems and translating them back into physical space, Khoury proposes a feedback loop between ancient intelligences and contemporary technology—where self-cloning biological systems, sacred architectures, and digital computation begin to mirror one another. “As my hand mimics the machine, and the machine mimics God, a divinity emerges,” Khoury reflects. The works feel both ancient and futuristic, collapsing time into a single surface.

Education

2020 BFA, New York University, New York, NY

Solo Exhibitions

2025
Memory Bands, James Fuentes, Los Angeles, CA

2024
Nexus, Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA

2022
Pure Boy, Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden
Supera, Over the Influence, Los Angeles, CA

Group Exhibitions

2025
Simulacra, Future Gallery, Berlin, Germany

2024
Point of Contact, Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden
Sparks, Future Gallery, Berlin, Germany
El Royale II, Loyal at El Royale, Los Angeles, CA

2023
Descendants, Curated by Melanie Lum, Micki Meng, and Kevin Poon, K11 Musea, Hong Kong
House of Seiko, Curated by Mario Ayala, San Francisco, CA
New Acquisitions, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami, FL

2022
Vaster than Empires, Friends Indeed, San Francisco, CA
House Parté II: The Final Salé, Palm Springs, CA

2021
Home Alone 2: Lost in Miami, Curated by Will Leung, Surface Magazine, Miami, FL

2020
The Life of Objects, 80WSE Honors Thesis Show, New York, NY

2018
The Commons, NYU Group Show, New York, NY

Collections

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL
X Museum, Beijing, China
Pond Society, Shanghai, China