The following conversation between Kelsey Isaacs and Robert Frost took place in September 2024 in conjunction with the exhibition Pop Life at Zodiac Pictures, LA.
I find that objects gravitate toward me through my life and I hold onto them. My recent paintings begin as miniature “sets” of these items that I arrange on the shower floor in my studio bathroom. In the dark, I light these tableaux with colored bulbs and handheld flashlights. Then I take hundreds of photographs with a digital camera with varying angles and cropping. Alone in my studio, I like to imagine that I am recreating the experience of a corporate focus group obsessively debating and engineering minor decisions behind a product like an American Eagle sweater or something. I’m interested in the indulgent process of digital decision making, where the labor is invisible. This photo becomes the blueprint for a painting.
I work serially and these reflections allowed me to push the boundaries in using limited source material — I wanted to stretch out what variations were possible through working from a single object. I draw parallels between the literal revealing of my painting process and with my recent work, the undoing of exposed layers within the painting itself. I’m interested in the tension that can come from moments of clashing logics within a painting.
Yes, I use lighting to draw attention to the process and the surface of the paintings. While I am making these photographs, I am thinking about staged spectacles like concerts, where light is used economically to create drama, signal transformation and control visual hierarchy. These paintings revolve around objects that call attention to their own surfaces. Whether through a reference to the photographic process or through the way the painting is made, I am interested in building up an illusion and then revealing the apparatus from which it was created.
I see repetitive objects as banal units of division within the canvas. The arrangement of objects allows me to create a geometric structure through which I can break into the painting. Because I don’t actually have a visual imagination, I use these objects to create scenarios that I can work from. These objects are empty of any personal history for me and are used as tools to generate contemporary images that are really entry points into asking questions about painting and process.
The sets have become larger and more complex, but levels of realism vary more in my recent work. The paintings I showed at Chapter and green&silver1 are referencing a much smaller and less complicated surface area — the platforms for these paintings were photo album covers and binders. For my shows at Theta and Clima, I worked from sets that covered the entirety of the shower floor in my studio. The floor is actually visible in partyrockerXclearhistoric Large from the show at Clima.
For youngfreak Small, the camera quality becomes a filter between the 3D set to the final painting. There is something about the ephemerality and speed of advancement in camera technology that reminds me of the history of painting in hyperspeed — where we went from cave paintings (i.e. low grade digital images) to the renaissance (4k video) in a matter of decades. By using an older camera I am drawing attention to the process of creating the painting, in the same way that I have left areas of my paintings not fully rendered.
I don’t feel a responsibility to attend to any genre so much as to the painting itself. I like to think that there are clashing tropes and techniques from different historical moments within each of my paintings. I switch between focused sessions of faithful rendering, and using methods in painting that disrupt my ability to control. As the paintings have become more complex, I leave areas at varying levels of finish. I think, in this way, the paintings are acting out their own process. This is where my work is playing off of the conventions of abstraction, where there is a historic fetishization of process and spontaneity that is seen as truth. Additionally, I often revert objects back to pure geometry, stepping away from detailed articulation and toward compositional rhythm.
For a new group of paintings that I will show at Frieze in London this October, there are areas of degradation to the image that come from the process of building illusionistic space within the paintings — I will often render areas and then scrape layers of paint away. Just as I will spend hours tediously reproducing elements of a photo, I will also painstakingly mimic false moments of spontaneity, like a staged drip.
