John Isaac

John Isaacs
are you like me full of hope and full of fear
December 9, 2005 - February 4, 2006

"…and some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher…."
-Captain Ahab from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

In his second New York exhibition at Feigen Contemporary, John Isaacs, a British artist working in Berlin, presents a body of new sculptures, prints and a film. Titled are you like me full of hope and full of fear, the exhibition provides a new staging of his gothic and corporeal artworks. With gentle humor, we are encouraged to reconsider a world gone askew by the clues offered up in fragments of everyday life and the world around us. Like bits of an overheard conversation or lines read randomly from the script of a play, five sculptures posited on plinths and posed in the main gallery form a non sequitur of isolated yet connected realities.

A highly polished bronze sculpture of a flabby leg is both seductively elegant and repulsively abhorrent. In contrast is an over-sized half-peeled potato made from wax representing an everyday action of something either half-started or half-finished. The powerful gesture of a giant pointing hand that seems to have tumbled down from a statue of some deity or historic ruler imbues it with an aura of the absent figure. A truncated tree made from plaster is lit with a meager light bulb sprouting at the end of each amputated branch and stands like a tragic lighthouse incapable of offering any guidance or safety. And, the imposing sculpture of a bloody shark fin severed from the formidable predator serves as a cultural icon of fear, terror and irrational belief.