Experience artist Isabella Whitfield’s closing day performance—in which she will rehydrate, deconstruct, and transform the wet floor signs from her exhibited installation work “How to recall a message.” This pulp will be preserved and incorporated into future, undetermined artworks.
Inspired by the ways in which personal aptitude can be misaligned with environmental and social expectations, Best regards, urges viewers to double back and look closer. Is the thing I’m looking at what I think it is, or something else? Do the things that I say and do actually come across to others the way I intend?
Primarily working with paper and metal, Whitfield renders safety equipment, tools, and other utilitarian objects. Through her use of color, material, and repetition, the artist alienates individual parts from their original substance, mode of presentation, and broader systems of utility—contradicting the ways in which the objects typically function. In bringing an uncanny look and feel to the familiar, Whitfield destabilizes initial recognition with an undercurrent of incertitude.
The exhibition’s namesake, a common e-mail correspondence sign-off, holds a similar duplicitous potential. “Best regards” can convey genuine kindness, yet it is sometimes used to mask frustration or apathy beneath the veneer of civility. Disguising ulterior dispositions under an innocuous surface.
Facetious yet sentimentally sincere, Best regards, grapples with the precarious nature of agency amid public and interpersonal interpretation, and the tension that underpins the notion of purpose.
Isabella Whitfield (b. 1998; Centreville, VA) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Virginia, working primarily in sculpture and site-responsive installation. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture and Politics from the University of Virginia, she completed a postgraduate year as an Aunspaugh Art Fellow. Whitfield’s fabrication process adopts repetitive motions, testing physical endurance through mundane performative actions.
By abstracting object materiality, she examines the internal disassociation that arises when intended purpose contradicts actual functionality. Inspired by contemporary artifacts, religious architecture, and commonplace tools, her work is quietly precise, inviting viewers to confront the familiar with a sense of alienation. Whitfield exhibits primarily in the DMV and has been a resident artist with Penland, Anderson Ranch, Ox-Bow, Pyramid Atlantic, and VisArts Richmond. She is currently a Papermaking Associate at Pyramid Atlantic. Whitfield is a 2022–2024 Hamiltonian Artists fellow.
Past Exhibition
Primarily working with paper and metal, Whitfield renders safety equipment, tools, and other utilitarian objects. Through her use of color, material, and repetition, the artist alienates individual parts from their original substance, mode of presentation, and broader systems of utility—contradicting the ways in which the objects typically function.…
