In Plastic Sleeves

Inspired by found family photographs, Isabelle Heldenfels manipulates the scale, color, and orientation of domestic scenery to transform this often idyllic imagery into compositions with amusing and unnerving implications. Sourced largely from photo albums as indicated by the exhibition title, Heldenfels’s process serves simultaneously as a method of identity-building and estrangement. Placed in various time-periods from the artist’s hometown Dallas, Texas, the seemingly familiar characters are largely unknown, and the stories, both the original and Heldenfels’s depictions, are never fully articulated. While the peculiar arrangements of these paintings invite interpretive speculation, Heldenfels’s technique itself relies on a combined application of realistic, painterly renditions of the original photographs and imaginative reinventions of color and composition where disparate images strategically comingle resulting in perplexing visual narratives. Presumably celebratory occasions are complicated by weighty but mysterious symbols—a nightgown, a lock and key, or swimmer’s goggles pair with equally inexplicable outbursts of color and tonality furthering our desire to uncover the gravity behind these found, fictional memories. While Heldenfels’s retelling of these events enlivens the interest in the otherwise forgotten moments, her process rebuilds history only to destroy it—a dramatized fictionalization of times that were likely already staged. Her characters occupy a space that no longer exists, observant specters leaving impressions that transfer shared emotional impact for the viewer, subject, and creator alike, but refuse to memorialize their former existence with any confirmation of perceived truth-telling. Along with Heldenfels’s often eerie undertones, the playful aesthetic resembles both a kitschy sense of nostalgia and a recognizable history of American folklore, but her project suggests the originals might be as concocted as her own creative inventions. Searching through her plastic sleeves, Heldenfels seeks answers to where we have been and what got us to this place—a new story of our shared memories that manages mostly to confuse the American narrative rather than confirm it. While Heldenfelds’s paintings originate from an earnest effort to archive our visual identity, her artistic project reinforces the fear, beauty, and necessity involved in leaving our history malleable and incomplete. Isabelle Heldenfels received her Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt University in 2023. She has since appeared in group exhibition at Galerie Shibumi in New York, Blue Mountain Gallery in New York, and 440 Gallery in Brooklyn. This is her first solo exhibition at Hyacinth.