Issy Wood’s pictures flatten totems and trash on to the same plane, indexing the shifting lives of objects that have been worn in and burnished by the hands of time, attachment, love and loss. Often sourced from iPhone screenshots of pop culture as well as family heirlooms and self-portraits, her paintings are frequently interspersed with overlaid motifs such as the silver dials of vintage clocks (Study for I’m late, I’m late; Or so I’ve heard and Vanessa hates Easter, all 2022) or whimsically out-of-scale vegetables (as in the cabbage tea set in a recent work, or the asparagus punctuating the composition of a fur-trimmed coat in Study for outdoor dining, 2023). Wood’s subject matter consistently and obliquely denotes the realm of a lightly damaged girldom, like a Pinterest board on ketamine—lockets and high heels, half-eaten chocolate bunnies, pie crusts, kittens, birds and blouses, and the interior of a Tesla that within this constellation feels more like a quiet glimpse inside a woman’s handbag than a macho engine rev.
