Chapter NY is excited to announce Ancient Gloss, Kelsey Isaacs’ first solo exhibition featuring a new series of paintings.

In Ancient Gloss, Isaacs manufactures imagery through a multistep process that begins with collaging rhinestones onto plastic photo album covers. She dramatically lights and photographs these reflective stages before remaking them in oil paint, recasting her mundane source material as fantastical fetish objects. Collaged together and replicated in her work, her subjects create formal relationships and distinct geometric compositions that assume a new identity.

In line with art historical trompe l’oeil techniques, Isaacs manipulates representational imagery within a shallow space that both emphasizes and plays within the limitations of a two-dimensional plane. She builds slick surfaces with considerable attention to detail while allowing subtle imperfections to reveal the painting’s own materiality, visually recording its own history as an object. Her forms draw the viewer in, but, upon closer viewing, traces of the artist’s hand unravel the artifice of their creation.

Isaacs develops each painting sequentially, using repetition to push her subject matter through multiple controlled iterations. With subtle cropping shifts and lighting variations, she disorients their perspective, pushing her works closer towards abstraction. Through these multiple interventions, the paintings become removed from their original sources and take on a logic of their own.

In pink&black6, the surface of a garishly pink album cover reflects a hazy portrait of the artist and a friend as they stage and photograph the album in her studio. Isaacs collapses the gleaming reflection of background lights and glittering rhinestones onto a glossy painted surface, rendering reflection within a reflective painted surface. The result is irresistibly, and unsettlingly, alluring.

Kelsey Isaacs (b. 1994, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 2016. Her work has been exhibited at Bungalow Earth, New York; Harkawik, New York; and King’s Leap, New York.