Best regards, Exhibition Walkthrough

Washington, DC: Hamiltonian Artists is pleased to present Isabella Whitfield’s solo exhibition Best regards,. Inspired by the ways in which personal aptitude can be misaligned with environmental and social expectations, Whitfield’s latest body of work 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, the artist 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 is sometimes used to mask frustration or apathy beneath the veneer of civility—disguising 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.

Host or Publisher Hamiltonian Artists