Jim lsermann 2026 by Miles McEnery Gallery

PATTERN RECOGNITION

Jesse Dorris

Across cultures and time, queer people have felt themselves to be outside of things. Often but not inherently they are in the marginal spaces of social infrastructures — comparable to a bruise on the hand of the arm of the school, a little smudge on the grid of the legal apparatus, wisps of perfume in the rarified air of the church, the tenderest leaf on the family tree. This is not to say that we queers invented metaphors, but who does them better? We understand what rises to the top and what lies beneath. We know you find depth only by inspecting the surface. For elementary class photographs, they line us up by height. On licenses and passports, they certify us by what’s between the legs. At mass, our ineffable souls are saved by confirmable action. There’s a family resemblance, a patterning.

Outside allows for a certain kind of space. Pattern-making, world-building. The reticular phraseology of Oscar Wilde, where every truth is its own opposite. The moral architecture of the Pier Paolo Pasolini movie Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), a blueprint in which the terminus of every passageway is degradation. The sexual fieldwork of Samuel Steward, who kept detailed descriptions of his sexual encounters in a card catalog he called his Stud File;

Bruce Goff, Untitled Composition, 1955-1970, Spray paint, opaque watercolor, colored pencil, and charcoal on cream wove paper prepared with daylight fluorescent orange paint, 44 1/8 x 28 1/16 inches (112 x 71.2 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Gift of Shin’enKan, Inc.

JI: “I only started working with acrylic paint seven or eight years ago. No matter what you do with it, it has a viscosity that leaves the brushstroke. I embrace it. When you have ten coats of paint, I’ll tape them all, but I’ll never put the tape over the paint once it’s down. So painting next to that, it’s all freehand, up to the ridge, and you’ll see the paint crossing. It will be thicker or thinner, where it might slip over the other color. They have, you

Paul Rudolph, Art and Architecture Building, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1958, Ink on board, 30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Gift of the architect.

the brilliant mathematician Alan Turning, who laid the foundation for the computer age in the late 1940s and early ’50s and whose code-cracking during World War II played a crucial role in Britain’s survival. (In grim thanks, he was prosecuted for homosexual acts in 1952 and agreed to chemical castration as an alternative to prison.) The airless erections of the architect Philip Johnson. The ecstatic four-to-the-floor of DJs Larry Levan, Honey Dijon, Octo Octa and Eris Drew, and Tygapaw. Then there are the artists: the concentric concentration of Harmony Hammond, the precision overlaying of performance by Lysinka, the folding chairs of Tom Burr, the gingerbread cabins of Nayland Blake. All these strategies are not necessarily about collapsing difference. They need not be (though sometime are) edifying. Or feeling seen. This box of words tries to invoke a queer kind of vast and sexy restraint, where neither less nor more is more, but it’s all just generative. It is. A pattern produces itself.

The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, designed 1953, architect, Philip Johnson, 2005. The Museum

know, a roughness that is in opposition to the geometry. In photographs, they look pristine. But my work has always been better in person, and this work, I think, even more so.”

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, Kahn & Jacobs, Seagram Building, New York City, New York, (North and west elevations), 1957, Graphite on ozalid, 52 x 37 1/4 inches (132.1 cm x 94.6). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Mies van der Rohe Archive, Gift of the architect.

These new paintings from Jim Isermann refit a body of work that has already read a rainbow into dreary straight minimalism. They turn—from his representations of botany and explorations of geometry, two fields both oppositional and linked, biological and intellectual, the hand of God or whatever and the hand of the painter, talk about categorical blur—toward direct reference, with parenthetical allusions to the architects whose achievements Isermann is, here, modeling. In acrylic on canvas over aluminum panel, he reimagines some Bruce Goff portals, Paul Rudolph schemes, and Philip Johnson portals. Some only get data titles. But each seems to overflow the hypnotizing flatness upon which Isermann previously floated the eye. Uniform in their shape and size, and also in their brilliance of hue and contrast, each is afforded the possibility of a mess. In that way, they reference the real world.

A few years ago, Isermann designed a concrete wall module. It’s no wonder that some of his paintings might embody the imprint of the cinder block, an homage to the balancing act performed across

of Modern Art, New York, NY.

JI: “I’m esoteric as anybody. I’ve never been good at predicting what people actually want, but I love the idea of having things available.”

Palm Springs, where Isermann is based, and beyond. This pretty squat lump architectural gesture is a balancing act of concrete and air. And now there is the thing itself. Isermann stacked them into a backyard wall, but he couldn’t get the product off the ground, manufacturing-wise. He had better luck with mass-produced pool towels. Utility blankets did well; he made one dog-size, and he made one suited for the backseats of the cars of his designer friends. He built a bookcase for his new boyfriend’s poetry collection, and the shelves became the room. One of the new paintings, Untitled (0325) (2025), is a split-screen perforated on each side by rows of squares themselves surrounded, on two sides, by two parallelograms. Each screen is a reverse of the other. In a glance, the left side shows rows of art books held in space (in order); the other view displays their absence. It could be a map of how things fit together or fall apart. Another: Untitled (0225) (2025) might offer open shelves before an arched doorway; there is no guidebook to where we’re going.

More: In Untitled (0424) (2024), the windows are the wall. Untitled (0525) (2025) is all wall, spectacularly, a glittering sunset-colored terminus where the light source doesn’t quite make sense; as the blue shadows grow without logic, the form could become a gate or a grate, a way down, into, or through. In Untitled (0625) (2025), the eye comes across a pair of softly joined plush circles spattered white and wrung with pink.

Throughout 2025 and across the country, visible iterations of queerness were taken down. Local or federal government agencies blackened over rainbow crosswalks, pulled books from library shelves, canceled grants and exhibitions, fired and deported employees and students and journalists, and told trans folks they did not, in

JI: “Some commemorative sculptures are sentimental failures. But so much of my work is about repetition of really straightforward modules that create something more complicated. It has a great presence from the car. And then when you walk up to it, you realize it’s taller than you are. I just didn’t want there to be any question about what was being represented.”

Jim Isermann, Palm Springs Pride Monument, 2025, 8 x 14 x 14 feet, Polyurethane paint on stainless steel. Frances Stevens Park, Palm Springs, CA. Commissioned by Palm Springs Pride. Design optimization and fabrication oversight by Metalab.

fact, exist. Queer lives went off the record. In October, Isermann made another model available. In Palm Springs’ Frances Stevens Park, he poured concrete into the footprint of a Lambda, the coded symbol for gay liberation, set within a circle. He piled triangles—the geometric marker Gran Fury reclaimed from the Nazis—that were made of folded steel into an undulating but unbreaking wall. As a viewer cruises the Palm Springs Pride Monument, the structure unfurls itself, wrapped in the rainbow hues of the Progress Pride flag—updated from Gilbert Baker’s 1978 original to include expanding identities. The monument is itself an update to Isermann’s iconic rainbow cube from the late ’90s, storming out of the gallery and into the streets of California’s queer enclave. It seizes the means of production Isermann developed to make walls and screens for Texas football stadiums and museums around the world and deploys it for a bit of public art dedicated to those whose private lives are constantly patrolled. In the new paintings, brick-and-mortar locations shimmer in their solidity, but as the monument testifies, those blocks can break apart and remodel themselves into “somewhere,”

JI: “If I lean one way or another, it would be towards being a decorator. I do like solving functional problems. But I don’t really want to make your life better for you. I want to make your life better for me.”

as the song goes, “a place for us.” “Somewhere,” as the song goes, “over the rainbow.” “Somewhere,” as the song goes, to “feel mighty real.”

Not far from the monument sits Isermann’s Palm Springs home, a prefabricated light gage galvanized steel house designed by Donald Wexler for the Alexander Construction Company. Here, Wexler’s modernist formula bears fruit: concrete screens, open breezeways, rational interiors. He dreamed of this house numbering into the thousands, a new way to live in a town willing itself into existence from the desert. But its economics were too decadent. Steel costs limited the number of buildings to seven, a model minority. Isermann keeps his house just so. Its furniture and accessories, precisely placed, are of the period. He hangs his own work on the walls and watches the sun bleach out the color. In another place up north, he has another life. But here is a kind of performance, an homage, a cover version, a drag show of modernism that swaps out the feminine ideal for a spatial one. Which is not to say they’re unrelated. Sometimes camp interior decorators are the first of us to be seen. We watch them seduce our enemies into remaking the world in our image. It’s a world in which rules are strict necessities, but there is also switchy role-play. A world in which the flimsy can be deadly serious. Where how things look from the outside is a paramount concern, because you can never be sure it won’t be you out there next time. We discover the possibilities and use them to recreate ourselves. We, like Isermann, are seeing there’s a pattern here.

Jesse Dorris is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, and the host of the show Polyglot on WFMU.