Intricate layers of plastic form obscure landscapes in Kelsey Isaacs’s work. On the shiny ground of her studio bathe, the artist arranges artificial, usually reflective or translucent, supplies as ad-hoc phases, spotlit by the concentrated glow of handheld flashlights. The outcomes of Isaacs’s non-public rituals are photographed from a number of views and rendered in oil. These work kind the artist’s first solo exhibition at Theta.

Isaacs reanimates scenes of decoration and accumulation via portray. She makes use of cheap gadgets that channel gentle or shine, and consequently, mimic glitz. These are shifty issues. From object to photographic topic, to painted picture, the artist’s supply materials turns into more and more distorted and estranged from itself, and the road between objectivity and subjectivity is tenuous. These are arduous compositions to know. Tampering with legacies of each abstraction and photorealism, Isaacs constructs a pictorial language by which constancy coincides with doubt.

All through the exhibition, Isaacs workout routines cautious degradations of trompe l’oeil, presenting unusual matrices of trinkets held collectively by tape or by gravity. Sure areas of those tableaux are painted with consuming precision, whereas different sections morph into an array of freer brushstrokes. A brand new sequence of 4 work attracts from a single configuration of rhinestone grids, plastic studs and ribbon forged in purple gentle. Cropped and magnified, and in a single occasion, drained of pigment, these unsystematic techniques venture an environment of disintegration. Layers of exact coloration shift inside these geometries, interrupted by lacking items and dotted with diverse representations of sunshine. Isaacs calibrates these stylistic gaps to reflect fluctuations in perceptual expertise and to destabilize logics of worth and a spotlight.

The work right here mirror obsession, however they aren’t glorifications–fairly they construct to find unknown worlds within the banality of shiny trivia. Forged in stark and looking out gentle, these near-still lives resemble excavations in progress.

—Daniel Merritt

at Theta, New York
till October 21, 2023