Supporting Roles is an exhibition of 9 working drawings and 1 poem written for a LED screen. Jim Isermann’s drawings were selected from two years of preparatory work for a new series of paintings. The images are dependent upon architectural details of gay, queer or otherwise marginalized architects. Isermann has been exclusively drawing on grid paper for over thirty years and they are rarely exhibited. T.S. Leonard has composed a poem explicitly to be experienced as a scrolling sequence of words, each a beam in the structure—their meaning mounting in succession. The looping text, repeated in two variations, dialogues with the patterns in Isermann’s drawings, each work exploring the stages of building and the often invisible compositions of our communal environments.
As partners, too, in a romantic relationship, Isermann and Leonard are interested in exploring the supporting roles we play as artists, as lovers, as builders, and as citizens.
Jim Isermann, a son of the Midwest, is an artist based in Palm Springs and Guerneville, California. His forty-plus year career encompasses craft, painting, sculpture, installation, art-in-public-spaces and the odd product design. He has shown widely in the US and Europe and his work is in many public collections.
T.S. Leonard is a disco poet time machine from Kansas City, Missouri who lives and teaches in San Francisco. His writing has appeared in Foglifter and the Poetry Foundation, and his performance work includes 2020’s Even Still They Shook and the queer punk band Soft Butch.