Isaac Pool

ONE NIGHT ONLY

Nathalie Karg Gallery presents a reading of Light Stain by Isaac Pool with Leslie Allison and Colin Self.

Isaac Pool’s work with images, objects and text engage with a perverse sense of realism, straddling fictional narrative and material investment. Light Stain is a selection of recent poems and three decades of snapshots, including images captured by the artist’s mother, Deb Pool. Light Stain is limited to 150 numbered copies and is the first in What Pipeline's Detroit Artist Book series, funded in part by The Knight Foundation.

Praise for Light Stain:

Isaac Pool is an imagist poet of gross Americana - mall textures, bad food, landfill things, website text. I think Light Stain is about being poor, being gay, and noticing things. And it's full of one of my favorite phenomena: the surprising tenderness of the totally alienated. - Johanna Fateman

In Isaac Pool's sculptural works, one encounters a series of quasi-figures that are abject but also extremely funny. Such works (for lack of a better term) conjure awkward forms of presence, subtly echoing a landscape and idiom of post-disaster capitalism Detroit where he is from, but also of a queer habitus after the Internet. The poems in this book provide an integral context for Pool's aesthetic practices. Navigating familiar institutional and social spaces, they tell a story of the promethean courage by which one transcends their class origins while remaining faithful to their cultural background. Forms of life are mediated by objects (the photographs collected in the book show us this). There is a numinousness about objects and of private spaces that seem as disposable as they do otherworldly (light stains?). - Thom Donovan

Leslie Allison is a composer and writer living in Brooklyn. Her most recent choral compositions will premier in the play Won't Be A Ghost (Francis Weiss Rabkin) at Dixon Place in September. Her first chapbook of poems, Martha (Ugly Duckling Presse), was released in April.

Colin Self composes and choreographs music, performance, and environments for expanding consciousness, troubling binaries and boundaries of perception and communication. Working with communities across disciplines and practices, Colin utilizes voice, bodies, and computers to interface with biological and technological software. He attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently an MFA candidate at the Bard Milton-Avery Program in Music/Sound.