Isaac Layman—Paradise

Isaac Layman (b. 1977) has, in a few short years, established himself as an exceptional talent and is today one of Seattle’s most respected artists. The Frye Art Museum is proud to host his highly anticipated first solo museum exhibition. In Paradise, Layman expands his practice of constructing large-scale, psychologically charged, photographic-based visions of the spaces and objects found in his Seattle home. His new artworks explore the desire to fabricate escapes, destinations, and monuments and the role discontent plays in driving the need to create imagined perfection.

Curated by Frye Art Museum Director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Isaac Layman—Paradise features twenty new works created especially for the exhibition. These works address what Layman considers fundamental questions for finding or fabricating meaning in his life—questions as useful as they are unresolvable. Why are we here? Are we alone? How do we find a sense of whole while discerning difference? What are the difficulties and rewards of being alive? Layman believes that the paradise for which we often long “is the imagination and its projections; it represents artificial perfection. While it is the equal and opposite of confusion and disappointment, it would take the latter to imagine the former. Paradise always includes the heartache that came, that had to come, before that imagined perfection.”

Accompanying the Frye Art Museum exhibition is a catalogue documenting Layman’s paradise. It includes an essay by another exceptional Seattle talent, poet and author Doug Nufer. Almost all of Nufer’s fiction and poetry is based on formal constraints. His essay on Layman is largely a multiple parentheses constraint similar to one used by Raymond Roussel in his literary masterpiece New Impressions of Africa (1932). “Like Isaac,” Nufer observes, “Roussel confined himself to his room while touring paradise.” The catalogue, which also contains an essay by Birnie Danzker as well as a conversation with Layman on his practice, is available in the Frye's Museum Store.

Layman’s work has garnered increasing attention across the United States and earned reviews on National Public Radio and in leading journals, including Artweek and Art in America. His objects are included in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington; the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami; the Monsen Collection of Photography, Seattle; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; the Seattle Art Museum; and the Tacoma Art Museum. Layman was the recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award in 2008.