The Brooklyn Rail

ISOVIST opened its doors in April 2024 at the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media with a dual mission: to foster interdisciplinary artistic exchange and to encourage viewers to attend to the peripheries of perception. Borrowed from architectural theory, an isovist describes the total visual field available from a given point—what’s directly ahead, and what hovers at the edges.

I hold it towards you, the fifth exhibition to be mounted at ISOVIST and guest curated by Fabiola Alondra, finds its ideal fit in this framework. Taking the human hand as prompt and organizing principle, Alondra issues an open call that unspools into a centuries-long, cross-cultural conversation about the hand’s depiction, labor, symbolism, and metaphysics.

The exhibition is divided into two interwoven parts: a multimedia group show of eighteen Yale-affiliated artists (the center), and a looping slideshow of one hundred objects drawn from five Yale archives (the objects lurking in the periphery). Together, they read as a dense palimpsest of marks and citations—an atlas of gestures, tools, relics, and traces. While “the hand” might seem a limitless theme, Alondra’s curatorial method—refined through years of working at the intersections of history, anthropology, archaeology, spiritual traditions, and material culture—shapes the sprawl into something lucid and surprising.

What most delights are the unexpected correspondences between contemporary works and the esoteric holdings of Yale’s collections. In Montana Simone’s Abacus (lifted) (2025), we encounter three enigmatic objects: a rusted metal grid leaning casually against the wall, an empty basin, and a wall-mounted sculpture resembling a dissected organ. On a nearby shelf, six fingertip impressions sink into a slurry of gold pigment. The arrangement sparks déjà vu. Moments earlier, the slideshow displayed an image of three Indonesian funerary fingernail covers from the fifth century BCE., cast in actual gold and housed at the Yale University Art Gallery. Ritual, death, class, empire, and belief flare between the two works. They prompt the unsettling question of what we continue to invest in—thinking through matter, memory, and the afterlife. The atheists shiver; the would-be tomb raiders leave Simone’s humble contemporary offerings untouched.

A few steps away, Ris Igrec traces the evolution of physical touch into code. Her silent black-and-white video collage enlarges digital portraits of family and friends, some rendered as numbers and characters through ASCII—the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The work foregrounds the frequency with which our biometric signatures are gathered by governments and AI systems. It echoes a drawing by Saul Steinberg in the Beinecke Library’s collection, where fingerprints replace both human heads and the landscape itself, raising questions around the essence of our identity and who defines it. Known for his razor-sharp satirical depictions of Nazi fascism in The New Yorker, Steinberg spent his career skewering the state’s obsession with documentation and surveillance. The resonance with Igrec is unmistakable. Her decision to present the work on an old tube monitor adds a note of technological fatalism. No matter the interface, the data hunger persists.

A potent feminist inflection surfaces in a collaborative photograph by Ann Burke Daly and Marion Belanger. At first glance, it reads as a scratched study of the night sky. But the artists have overlaid their own photograph with negatives from Harvard’s Astronomical Glass Plate Collection, and titled the work after Agnes M. Hoovens, a Harvard scientist whose early twentieth-century contributions to astronomical research remain largely unrecognized. Their gesture of recuperation echoes another archival presence, Grete Stern’s Sueño No. 31, housed in the Yale University Art Gallery. Stern’s surreal photograph, featuring a woman’s decapitated head perched atop a man’s paintbrush, lays bare the long history of women cast as muses, myths, or symbols rather than as artists granted authority and visibility. Despite her substantial contributions to Surrealist circles, Stern remains underknown, and the exhibition’s placement of her work sharpens the show’s ongoing critique of selective erasure.

Life, death, mourning, reproduction, and return form the exhibition’s dominant emotional register. These themes converge into a reflection on the absurd condition we share. We generate archives endlessly—personal, institutional, cultural, major, and minor. We sort, classify, accumulate, and deaccession, as though the archive might help us remember or re-remember what time inevitably dissolves. This infinite spiral is embodied in Jeff Whetstone’s exploded three-dimensional archive, as well as the plaster cast hand of Lewis Stevenson in the Beinecke’s collection, and the John Keats poem that the title of the exhibition derives from:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is– 
I hold it towards you.

– John Keats

Keats’s sinister narrator predicts that his lover will value his “warm and capable” hand more in death than in life, simply because it/he will cease to exist. Gently but firmly, the show agrees—the impulse to create and the impulse to archive are both kinds of grasping, two sides of the same coin.