Kelsey Isaacs’s shower floor is home to a sculptural tableau that quite literally sets the stage for a practice in search of ways to “touch an image,” in the artist’s words, in a moment defined by all-pervasive image theater. Comprising mirrored tiles and sequins, unspooled ribbons and strips of plastic bedazzling gems choreographed in miniature arrangements — sometimes accessorized by a toy disco ball or sparkly pen — her mise-en-scènes of ebullient junk-drawer décor miscellany are provisional, phantasmagoric prisms of “nothing” assembled only to be photographed like so much of our existence. Did you do it for the jpegs? Did it happen otherwise? The effect is decidedly material and incorporeal — reflecting, refracting, and pooling viscous spotlights fashioned from handheld flashlights and flashes of digital point-and-shoot cameras from the recent past and early 2000s. Akin to so many desperate snapshots seeking to arrest every fleeting thing, Isaacs takes hundreds of photos of these lo-fi dreamscapes in the bathroom of her New York studio before choosing one to paint to brilliant, Candy Crush-luminous effect.
In contrast to the popular imaginary of Los Angeles, that sprawling façade where the artist grew up, each of her paintings performs a kind of micro-spectacle, magnifying insignificant details as one might orchestrate the banal theatrics of a hyper-mediated life. Importantly, Isaacs’s work casts the orchestrated nonchalance of her carefully planned vignettes as both deadpan melodrama and idealized formal invention, disrupting the myth of inherent slickness (and falseness) of our digital present, where image-as-reality-as-image folds back upon itself at unimaginable speed. “We only experience reality through the pictures we make of it,” Douglas Crimp wrote in 1977.1 This still holds true, but in a collapsed and accelerated form that we know in our bones and dysregulated nervous systems. Did you hear that teens are calling the ’90s the late 1900s these days?
Literary theorist Anna Kornbluh describes our collapsed present as “immediacy, or the style of too-late capitalism,” elaborating on the phrase in her eponymous text with emphatic physicality: “a deluge […], a stylized flood of intense immanence in cultural aesthetics.”2 The sense of a surging and swelling into a pronounced now-ness is a crucial element of Isaacs’s lexicon, a texture that calls to mind a recent physics theory that predicts the thickening of fluids as they approach the speed of light. Unlike the concept of desublimation — whereby the analogy of solids turning directly into gas communicates a unilaterally critical view of art and society’s hollowing out through mass commercial culture — Isaacs is fascinated with the liquid smoothness of the artificial. As lifestyle becomes synonymous with life, experience hardening into relics in real time, her work posits that reality itself is based in a new kind of formalism.
In turn, her works linger over visual forms and surfaces that are ultimately material to our experience of the world. A work called glassmagentaXdarkwhite Large (2023), from her 2023 solo show at Theta, New York, for instance, is a seductively inscrutable trompe l’oeil still life of an empty plastic CD case and a gathering of metallic-tinted ribbon like some unidentifiable mechanism, complicated by its compositional framing in a transcendent halo of modernist abstraction’s idealized elements of red, blue, and yellow. While reminiscent of a scientific optical diagram and celestial orb, the protagonist is a mass of bubble-gum-pink light you’d want to bite but know will taste rancid, rendered in buttery, sumptuously applied oil pigments yet detached as if captured by a fish-eye-cam lens. The result is a morphing of our bodily senses lulled to sleep by the trance of an ASMR makeup-contouring video and yanked out by the deadening air of sickly syrupy artifice, pumped out like the signature Bath & Body Works aroma of the artist’s mall culture youth. This isn’t toxic positivity, just a reality check on the “unreal” permeating our daily lives with tangible immediacy.
Informed by photography’s history as a trace of reality through light as index, her stage-set constructions and their photographs are, for her, the material “fact” of paintings that wield illusions in various states of finish and undoing. And like hyperpop-hued afterimages of ideological grand narratives, in which painting is an object of authenticity and photography a document of truth, her resulting paintings exaggerate and erase the visual data they present. Shimmering grids crystalize and glisten like activated circuit boards in pencilgray Large and partyrocker Large (2023), or mesh lattices dissolving and reappearing in grounds of pastel deviants of modernist abstraction throughout her 2023 Theta exhibition. In her solo show the following year, youngfreaks at Clima, Milan, flattened still lives materialize from satiny seventeenth-century Dutch chiaroscuro lens flares and electrified gradients reminiscent of aura photographs made from energy signals and body heat in darkprimary Medium and darkprimaryXL (both 2024). But as the primary colors of vision referenced in the works’ titles radiate purple, cyan, magenta, and the complete light spectrum, a magnet-smooth mood ring mysticism brings a heightened knowledge of absence within presence and presence within absence that is our contemporary age, always with something lost or just beyond grasp.
In this way, Isaacs gives visceral shape to the “and, and, and…” of our contemporary perception: the seven-thousand-tab, nothing-behind-the-eyes, asleep-at-the-wheel, driving-while-scrolling moment in which everything is immediately imaged or made in anticipation thereof, calcified into currency, selves fixed into social forms via aesthetic formulas. At the same time, her precise technique and translation of technologies, from analog, rudimentary still life to digital photograph to painting, enact temporal tension. They glitch — or, rather, skip, like scratched CDs from the empty cases that frequent her work — across multiple aesthetics of time and periodized forms of painting and photography with their ricocheted pattern of metaphysical associations and blockchain of self-reference that mimics the state of simultaneity defining our present.
It’s telling that Isaacs’s underlying kaleidoscopic compositions and crystalline geometries recall the Futurists’ abstract interpretations of speed in the early twentieth century, another destabilizing time of unfathomable technological and ideological transformation known as modernity. Why are we thinking about modernism in 2025? Why wouldn’t we be thinking about modernism in 2025? However, unlike those of the Futurists, her paintings don’t communicate the omnipresence of an ahistorical “always-future,” created by “man,” with fascist underpinnings and ideas of purity. Radically zoomed, pressed flat, cropped close, as if held in a petri dish for microscopic observation, Isaacs’s work reveals the subliminal omnipresence of media itself. And by hastening moments of friction between the smooth and the sharp, signs of illusion and reality, close-looking and abstraction, she ultimately slows us down, allowing us to haptically feel image constructs for what they are — image as window, image as mirror, image as a screen, image as reality — and crack them open in order to build a new kind of image.
The artist’s first solo show, “Ancient Gloss” (2022), at Chapter, New York, addressed the imperceptibly sutured-together architecture of the contemporary head-on. The exhibition focused on a series of barely modulated monochromes in makeup-blush peach, or the bedroom turquoise of many a millennial girl of the ’90s and early aughts. Framed in heavy graphic black outlines reminiscent of Jo Baer’s monochromes from the 1960s, which treated intentionally blank canvas as a space for perceptual effect, her work is not the celebration of girlhood it is sometimes mistaken for. In rectilinear forms rounded at the corners like screens minted by Apple and hard-edge abstractions scathingly bedazzled with rhinestone alongside jostling black grids like keys and apps beckoning our touch, her abstractions slyly disrupt patriarchal undercurrents of technocratic control under an innocent guise. And, perhaps, nod to ’90s cyberfeminism, with its ideal of reimagining the internet as a site for liberation.
In youngfreak Small (2024), a chromatic study in hot pink and red included in her eponymous exhibition at Clima, Milan, bedazzled jewels as geometric stripes further pervert the so-called objectivity of abstraction and the technological realm with micro-opulence and signs of the author. The work primarily calls attention to the simulation of Abstract Expressionism’s spiritual claims to unmediated subjectivity and divine expression; once you see Barnett Newman’s iconic zips in the vertical stripes on partyrocker Large (2023) and its violet expanse, you can’t unsee it. Positioned near the painting’s edge where a signature might be, the painted digits of the camera’s date stamp, “09.27.2023” offer a kind of temporal suture, periodizeing the image apparatus as author, laying bare the relationship between image, body, and world in a new kind of indexical relation and existential reckoning where human and emotion and device are inseparable. Like a live performance on stage, the visible construction spread out before you affords a new understanding of reality in which attention to form can revive a form of idealism, or at least a heightened awareness of the time-space-continuum that we know.
Isaacs’s paintings don’t scream death or modernism in their saccharine surfaces, but her nature mortes are aware of something both lifeless and generative beneath cloying colors backed by a mathematical structure of gray-brown values: the embodied feeling of our disembodied present. But in the ongoing cues of the outmoded throughout her work (be it a dated technology or aesthetic register or ideological position embedded therein), Isaacs realizes the agency to shape new images, as if glittering light particles dispersing and reconfiguring in a new fantastic arrangement.. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the outmoded is helpful: at the very moment something appears dated, it loses value (commercial) and thus reveals the utopian vision present at the invention’s outset. As Rosalind Krauss writes, summarizing Benjamin: “It is precisely at the moment of the obsolescence of that technology that it once more releases this dimension, like the last gleam of a dying star.”3
With the blown-out exposure of a white glow at the center of partyrockerXclearhistoric Large (2024), the artist recalls technology’s ability to imagine what isn’t there but could be, however seemingly minor the vision. Here, this spot of emptiness reads as the cross-section of a stage light beneath a synthetic, grape-soda-purple ground, or a techno strobe washing over a stage. Tight grids marked by flecks of paint, like pixels trying to generate data, avoid a horizon line and disclosure of their shadows’ source in sharp recognition of the abstract formal scaffoldings that signal display, theatrics, and performance, giving sci-fi movie poster and pop concert punctuated with silver star confetti. How do we hold on to humanness if artificial is the new authenticity? How do we slow down, but stay in motion? Maybe it’s a dance party, or just doing what it takes to feel real. In Isaacs’s words: “There is nothing more human than a person on the stage surrounded by the whole apparatus.”
It’s no accident that Isaacs’s shower is lined with shiny silver mylar like the inside of Andy Warhol’s balloons and Factory. But whereas Warhol used the studio as a site of art-making as industrial production and artist as celebrity, Isaacs operates as an advertising focus group or minor influencer — the ultimate formalists who deploy overstimmed mood boards to design sensory phenomena timed to the micro-trend nanosecond, trafficking in what she describes as the succinct, “beautiful minimalism” of advertising signals. In contrast to the in-the-street critique of a faux-corporate entity like Bernadette Corporation, or even Warhol’s knowingly grandiose self-mythologizing, Isaacs play-acts fashion campaigns, tinkering with pleasing visual rhythms akin to crafting an addictive pop hook or individualized self-image from her own bathroom. After all, where else can you get TikTok famous? Or where can an image? Is the mediated always the enemy, or can we just be real that this is the real state of things?
Worldbuilding is a dangerous notion these days, but what if the building isn’t possessing — what if it’s just a matter of remembering that you can create something, and that what matters is how you do it and to what end, and that the slate is never clean? Isaacs’s work intervenes in the traditional notion of formalism whereby visual appearances are distinct from the “real.” Armed with an understanding of reality as image — and thus visual forms as a means of reality-building, her brand of formalism is adjacent to the kind Kornbluh describes as an alternative to deconstruction, albeit in the tiniest gestures of our personal little stages, as a place to model anew what kind of life one might want or desire. For social relations and culture to be reconstituted, truth and authenticity may be what we still want, but what if what we need is just honesty? Not “radical transparency” but some orientation to being as being present in all the prescribed, ineffable, desperate, alluring, formulaic, exhilarating ways Isaacs’s paintings bottle up scents for her next painting or signature perfume. Who owns NOW now?
