Isaiah Philip: On View
Jarrad Heaslip Gallery
22100 Woodward Ave., Ferndale
Through Aug. 1
The thing I remember most about Isaiah Philip’s paintings is hair. The Nigerian-born artist adds texture to kinky coils by layering and swooping paint in his portraits.
An afro on a woman posing in a car becomes as dazzling as the distant lights of the nightlife behind her. In his piece “Quiet Crown,” a pile of locs wrapped up in a messy bun has as much personality as the woman wearing them.
Philip is a Detroit-based artist pursuing his Master of Fine Arts in painting at Wayne State University. He also works as a graduate teaching assistant at the university. This occasion, a solo show at the Jarrad Heaslip Gallery in Ferndale for the month of July, marks his debut exhibition in metro Detroit. It’s titled simply, Isaiah Philip: On View.
He works in portraiture with a hint of abstraction across oil, acrylic, charcoal, and mixed media, exploring the African diaspora.
The subjects are in scenes that haven’t quite been realized, not like the background is an afterthought, but like where they exist in space and time doesn’t quite matter. The woman in “Soujourner” could be your best friend picking you up for a night out. A man laying on top of a bar in “A Place to Rest” could be lounging in a nondescript apartment, bar, or restaurant.
The focus is on the detail in the subject’s faces, and the depths of velvety brown he paints in their skin tones.
In “Quiet Crown,” I see myself, a woman in a quiet reprieve with a mysterious monstera beside her. The way the piece is painted, with the woman seeming to step out a semi-oval frame into a sea of green with a stereo behind her, makes it feel like it’s taking place in the quiet edges of her mind. Maybe the music she’s listening to has transported her somewhere else — here into the gallery with you and me.
His painting “Presence” looks like it could be a cutout of LeRoy Foster’s “Renaissance City,” with a muscular man looking back at the viewer. Except in Philip’s painting, the expression on the subject’s face is a multilayered look of valor, pride, and, perhaps, frustration, as if he’s grappling with what it means to be witnessed in his vulnerability.
His body is certainly something worth looking at, but does the viewer focus on his physical attributes and forget that this is a human being with an entire identity that is beyond his appearance? What does it mean for Black bodies to be witnessed in this way? Does bearing the physical body afford the same vulnerability as bearing the soul? And is this man actually being seen for the complexities of his personhood or just seen on the surface?
The artist tells me he likes to experiment with different materials. In “Purple Boy,” Philip uses real hair instead of painting his subject’s locs. In this piece he also uses real wallpaper as the background, making sure to include a seam where the pieces don’t quite line up on either side.
He mentions that this is intentional, to show the imperfections, like the seams where one chapter in our lives ends and the next one begins. Even though the seams are sometimes ripped, as things don’t turn out as planned, we try our best to fix them. To realign them. To hide the jagged edges, and pretend that our wallpaper is continuous when it has been interrupted, rerouted, torn down, and reapplied many times. There’s no need to pretend here. It can start again, and be imperfect.
‘Isaiah Philip: On View’ will be on view at Jarrad Heaslip Gallery in Ferndale through Aug. 1. For more information, see jarradheaslipgallery.com.
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