
ARTIST STATEMENT:
In 2022, Isaac Mann began a painting series entitled “Rocketship Detroit,” leaving behind his career-starting subject matter of cartoonish, color-filled, sexual, multi-figure, large-format paintings in favor of starting a new chapter. Since then, Mann has painted, or in his preferred terminology, “built” rocket ships. On the face of it, there seems to be little DNA shared between these distinct periods, but Mann’s decade-long and distinctive career suggests an overarching narrative in multitudes of ways to the attentive viewer. Sex is still an inherent theme, perhaps now made more explicit by the phallic nature of the rocket ship. The importance and value of the object itself, and its function, also leans on Mann’s earliest professional work which were emphatic explorations of the iconic qualities on the mundane object. Now, hand crafting irregular shaped panels for his newest work, Mann again pokes at the idea of the icon, while embracing the pathetic imagery of, “little imaginary monsters of steel and kerosene.”
“Imaginary” is the key word in Mann’s painting. While government organizations and private billionaires currently manufacture and launch dozens of space-vehicles a year, Mann takes no aesthetic framework from these industries. Each painting is built from a one-take line drawing (or doodle would be more precise), that becomes the roadmap for the painting’s surface. The lines suggest composition which Mann listens to or ignores as he quickly defines form and volume as he covers the surface in a “workmanlike” initial layer. This practice allows for Mann to “find form,” a method that prizes unique shapes and original and interlocking compositions above all else. There is also room for play. Painted into the contours of Mann’s rocket ships the viewer can often find random objects, culture detritus, dirty cartoons and other flotsam and jetsam that get sucked up into the rocket engines.
Thematically, while sexual, ontological and autodidactic aspects feature greatly into the “Rocketship Detroit” project, none of these are what brought Mann to this subject initially. During the first year of the Rocketship project, Mann focused on large-format paintings — one in particular spanned 20 feet across and 16 feet high —the scale and drying times of these works yielded slower builds and it was during this period that Mann began his research into the history of rocketry and space exploration. Not just the technological narrative, but the co-mingled history of scientific ideas and thought, often expressed through illustration and literature. The narrative of inspiration intersecting scientific and artistic fields in particular fueled Mann’s curiosity. One such example being Jules Verne 1865 novel, “From Earth to the Moon”, a book that singularly inspired the future of rocketry. K.E. Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, Robert Goddard, and Valentin Glushko all visionary space pioneers, without which there would be no rocket engine, all cite Verne’s novel as seminal to their vocations.
Finally, Mann is a quietly self-declared optimist and not so quiet when it comes to his desire for more optimism in the world of contemporary painting. “Rocketship Detroit,” for Mann, symbolize this optimism. Exploring space is both a childish desire and a constant pull on human curiosity, and perhaps it always has been. The modern-day rocket ship is both the height of our civilization’s technological advancement as well as the heaviest and tallest monument to escapism we could ever hope to find. This juxtaposition is the core of Mann’s rocketships.