Arrangement, 2025


Directives, 2024





Horizon Lies, 2022, Performance, 45 minutes (excerpt)


Nina (Horizon Lies) production stills, 2022

 



Writing

ether hanging with friends, april april, 2022

Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50, with David Geer, QED, 2019

40 Volume, HAUNT Journal, 2016

ykepool.info, 2012-2015

BOMB Portfolio, 2016

Isaac Pool, Light Stain. A photograph of a sunset over the desert taken from inside a home with the frame of a window and a porch blocking the image of the sunset.
Untitled, 35mm snapshot, c. 1987 (Deb Pool)
Light Stain, 2015, book

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

Isaac Pool Erased Witig. A scan of Monique Wittig's The Straight Mind with all of the text digitially removed
Erased Wittig 2012, Alien She eBook cover

Alien She, the second title in the Klaus_eBooks series, is the effect of combining a scrapbook and a chapbook in an ebook. Pool’s poetry has an uneven syntax, with figures and events pivoting mid-line and slipping out of definition. Subjects don’t stay still; “it” becomes “she” and vice versa as the uncertainty and instability of a body’s presence in space acquires a bodily presence of its own. From the pauses and stutters of the sequence comes the Alien She--an ethereal aspect of femininity that is neither a body nor a sense of self embodied in language, but a way that those things can relate to social spaces and worlds of objects. Pool’s ideas about phantom femininity developed through an extended conversation with David Geer, Colin Self, and the late Mark Aguhar. Alien She includes contributions from all of them, but the insertions aren’t set apart from Pool’s works. They enter the flow of an already fragmented, open-ended text, forming a flickering presence of a collective body. - Brian Droitcour




RENTAL, a still from a VHS video. A white person in a dramatic dance pose points their elbow at the camera and looks downward while wearing a long black glove and a costume made of a colorful bathing suit and stuffed animals. There is a banner in teh background that reads SALE
RENTAL, VHS still, performance project, 2005-2007

 

RENTAL, The Pop Hits, 2004-2007

RENTAL, Noise Classics, 2004-2006





Doing A, 2012




40 Volume, performance for video, 2018-2019



Isaac Pool, 40 Volume, White, a vase covered in soiled white socks with the chain of a dong hanging from its mouth
White, 2013, glass vase, socks, hairgel, and chained rubber dong

Isaac Pool, 40 Volume, Stater Pack, a plastic cucumber strapped to a pink lightbulb, mascara, eyeliner, and lipgloss.
Starter Pack, 2017, ceramic and wire base, plastic cucumber, rubberband, lightbulb, eyeliner, mascara, and Heatherette for MAC lipgloss





Isaac Pool & Crystal Palmer, Good Piece of Food, A dog bed made from a denim jacket with the United Auto Workers logo emobssed on its back
Love Don't Live Here Anymore, 2015, denim, fabric, newspaper. With Crystal Palmer.






Isaac Pool A Alternatives. A plank of black plexiglass sits on a terracotta colored rubber mat that flaps off the wall onto the floor. The plank holds a photograph with a hairclip and a brastrap. The photograph depicts a spraypainted banner that says BECAUSE with a wicker basket hanging below and two towers of cans taped together above. The setting is an attic apartment with an 80's softcore pornographic glam poster of two blond women on the nearest wall.
Because, 2013, acrylic, digital c-print, hardware, Playboy Bunny bra strap, hair clip, rubber mat

 



Isaac Pool A Alternatives. A video still of a white person in a shiny, skimpy pop star outfit sitting on a bed in a hotel. They are closing their eyes and smiling while a brown woman in the back unpacks a suitcase on the bed. A subtitle on the screen reads this body foreclosure has a price
A Alternatives, 2013, 35 minutes

Isaac Pool A Alternatives. A broken wicker basket encased by a blonde wig and clumped cat litter.
Untitled Wig, 2013, wig, woven basket, cat litter, hairspray








Rollover (Pride, dreams, intelligence, Transhumanism), website, 2010




Transfer Progress, 2010, 57 minutes



A Agency fashion campaign, 2011






Isaac Pool a A broken mirror ball patched with spackle, reflective tape, and chrome chain mail trimming reflects small beams of light onto a wall that holds a costume hanging from a retail clothing rack that's been plastered into the wall. The costume is a headset for a child's pop star look and comes with a small bag of glitter. The product reads Drama QUEENS, Rock Star Mic.
More, most, variable, Repaired mirror ball, pin spotlight, Slatwall inset and hook, packaged costume headset, 2021








The Substitute, a collage on paper. A late 1980's paparazzi photograph of Madonna with yellow-blonde hair and holding a bouquet of yellow roses sits facing forward, looking away from the camera in the back of a black car. The photograph is from a book and fragments of text are cut off by a sheet of bronze leaf with a large chunk missing from the center placed on top. The text reads Fame does...price tag. When all the...
"The Substitute," 2012, Bronze leaf, book clipping, paper







Isaac Pool is a multidisciplinary artist working between poetry, performance, costuming, music, sculpture, and images. Pool's work challenges limits of identification and embraces fantasy and dissonance as tools for self-determination and social survival. They are from Detroit and live in New York.

CV available by request

email

Artfourm, BOMB