MABEL MCLEOD reviews two standout presentations at Frieze London: Kelsey Isaacs at Clima Galley and Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant.
Frieze is like luxury retail on steroids. It feels like being thirteen at Westfield for the first time: disorientated, overstimulated, pockets just deep enough for an overpriced pretzel. The place is enormous, blinding, and yet…somehow intimate. Constantly pulled from one booth to another, I accept that there’s no way to catch everything—but that may just be the point.
At the very front of the tent is the “Focus” section, dedicated to showcasing emerging galleries. Clima Gallery has chosen to exhibit New York-based artist Kelsey Issacs.
Encountering Isaacs’ work, I’m met with something strangely seductive—an overwhelming value given to plastic fragments and otherwise banal trinkets. Four oil paintings line the walls, presenting textures that feel indulgent: gleaming like precious metals, and lacquered with luxury. In classical possibility Large, I decipher cookie cutters, a safety pin, and a spoon; in classical detail—a crochet doily framed by dogtooth print. Yet, the works do not picture items as I know them; Isaacs’ compositions are objects suspended, somehow distancing themselves from their own physicality. Layers between boundaries are diffused, and cropped perspectives prevent any grounding within a single context.
The paintings, then, operate very much like memories—fragments elevated and blurred. We tend to remember in bits and pieces; in non-existent colours; in flashes of forms we recognise, but can’t place. Similarly, in her appropriation of reality, Issacs captures moments that hover between abstraction and truth. In primary XL, all I can make out are rhinestones and a tiled floor. As such, Issacs presents fragments that become substitutes for full experiences. Amidst the decontextualized space that is Frieze, viewers are called to wander through a gilded haze—construct the picture and restore the space in which these tableaux once existed.
It is our impulse to give meaning to the meaningless, to turn “junk” into objects of desire, and so, instinctively, to fill the inner void with sparkly pieces of plastic. We romanticize their allure until, inevitably, they cease to soothe the yearning, and we cast them aside. Untethered from their fleeting purpose, these pacifiers lose their meaning, becoming one and the same—another form of everyday debris. Yet, in Issac’s work, this process of designification reconstructs everyday objects into ones of beauty. We are reminded that the divine quality of a thing lies not in its intrinsic property, but in the effect of its place in a symbolic fantasy. Value is both a gift and a dream, something we assign, and an illusion we create.
Whilst the paintings maintain an appearance of organic chaos, behind the disorder is a meticulous hand. As explained by the gallery, the artist takes time perfecting the disjointed composition, repeatedly rearranging each scene, photographing each set-up hundreds of times before selecting the image that becomes her final reference. Her practice is almost sculptural in this way, bending light and surfaces to create something that feels artificial, dancing on the edge of surrealism. Social media is a facade, AI is working overtime; images so rarely are the authentic “moments” they claim to represent. In treating the artificial construction of “spontaneity” as itself an art form, Isaacs’ paintings constitute the perfect allegory.
As I push deeper into the Labyrinth, walking around like I’m thinking very important things, making very important judgements and wasting very important time, I stumble upon Project Native Informant’s booth. It’s a space that feels eclectic and deliberate.
Among the works on display, Dozie Kanu’s pieces stand out to me. I circle the perimeter and return three times to one piece in particular: Headboard (a tribe sleep) (2022), featuring a repurposed headboard leant against the plasterboard wall. Kanu is known for his adept use of recycled materials, sourced from antique shops and scrapyards. He repurposes objects that could otherwise feel like artifacts, arranging them to create beautiful contradictions. In Headboard, each element feels at odds: the headboard is a combination of steel, nails, a C-type print, and wood, bound together with an incongruous shoelace. Here, like in most of the artist’s sculptures, tension arises between the industrial and the personal. By distorting the original contexts of domestic objects, usually valued for their practical role, they are reframed as symbolic relics.
Kanu’s pieces oscillate between recognition and estrangement, as if tugging at memories we know we have, but cannot fully place. Headboard conjures up notions of intimacy without delivering comfort; you’re asked to examine what is left when utility is removed, and an object’s purpose—allowed to slip. By abstracting original function from familiar forms, Kanu draws attention to the hierarchies that shape our material lives. What does it mean for an object to “belong” in a world where value is tied so tightly to purpose?
Using varied materials like wood, steel, and nails, the artist dismantles any assumptions of purpose or placement. His sculptures at Frieze are a suspension of meaning, of pieces whose roles are neither fully functional nor completely ornamental, questioning the limits of both. Where everything else feels typically flattened into mere commodities, Kanu’s works feel rebellious and open-ended.
He shares with Isaacs an affinity for redefining value through a process of decontextualisation. Both their exhibitions reimagine the familiar and the overlooked. Caught in the cycle of high stakes acquisition and disposal, then stripped of their initial context, the works stand as symbols for fragility of meaning. In the setting of Frieze, they could simply become subjects of aesthetic evaluation surrounded by material excess. Just like the attendees of the fair—dressed a certain way, trained to dance around certain subjects—they, too, run a risk of eventually getting lost in a sea of gallery folk. Instead, these works broke the spell of passive detachment that had gripped me as I entered.
Violently dehydrated and with aching feet I’d finally made it through the maze, triumphed and exhausted. Leaving in a state of pleasant disorientation, I sat and looked up at the pretty trees in Regents park, trying to piece together everything I had just consumed. The last five hours slipped by like a blackout.
Featured image: Exhibition view, Clima Gallery. Frieze London 2024. Courtesy of the gallery.
