ROMANCE


Faith Icecold
 Cassandra

Sept 19–Oct 31, 2026

In mini toy pianos and paper clay, plastic, sewing pins, silver leaf, stuffed animals punctured with studs and blue ribbon; encaustic and glass beads on inkjet prints mounted to board; and sequined appliqués stitched on quilted silk taffeta and canvas, material reaches the fever pitch that defines Faith Icecold's accumulations of archival accoutrement. "New relics," the artist calls them, held together by cosmic thread and heated beeswax mixed with resin. Icons of cultural production cycle between time periods, now entirely collapsed and always accelerating. Relics of our time happen in real time. Original meaning travels in a subtext of memes and microtrends to which only some audiences might be privy,a kind of Neo-Dada bait and switch.

Cassandra, Icecold's first solo show at Romance, takes its title from the Greek myth of the Trojan priestess of Apollo, blessed with the gift of prophecy and cursed by the god never to be believed. "We are living in a New Roman Empire that will fall," Icecold says. "Canons must be fully destroyed and rewritten." What does it feel like to forewarn, to see that the system can't hold what it was never meant to, and for no one to listen?

For Icecold, image appropriation and material accumulation are intensive, alchemical transmutations of matter, as they have been for generations of artists. Taking an aesthetic system apart and reassembling its broken pieces, Icecold pulls images and forms from their historical contexts and makes them register what those contexts have concealed. The artist's work sits within a lineage of "emotional conceptualism," refusing any false separation between systems and their material and psychological effects. Postminimalist tropes of the monochrome, low-to-the-floor geometric structure, and serial repetition are reworked until the beliefs and emotions baked into "factual" forms come loose.

Refuse, mess, decor, and excess become forms of material seduction and serious sculptural inquiry, densely collaged into encrusted surfaces covered in milky encaustic. The sky's naturally occurring auroras. The light effects of a flatbed scanner. In the series Event Horizon, a comet is a moving celestial sculpture that is also a work of light, and black holes become collaborators. A phantasmagoric Carnival is made manifest. Camp is understood, rather than through irony or bad taste, as a Black-coded aesthetic invention, offering another mode of transformation as excess and cute appearances act as stealth vessels for subverting power. Zora Neale Hurston's "will to adorn" is an adjacent visual lineage, where decoration is considered to be essential to Black life.

In Icecold’s hands, appropriation is adhesive, the historical image pulled and pasted into the cartoon present, ornamented and made to reveal the systems that shaped its apparent neutrality. Chorus Chanting, 2026, a gridded mosaic caked thick with mortar, inlaid with decorative porcelain bells and imagery lifted from European Old Masters, belies colonialist impulses embedded within their seemingly innocent visual forms. Elsewhere, forlorn orphaned toys, Etsy craft exuberance, dollar store slap-stick, lo-fi image clippings from the corners of the internet. Textiles and assemblages akin to Greco-Roman grottos or mosaics suggest a timewarp of "high art" and tradition remixed through a Post Internet lens in Haitian spiritual altars and art historical reverence. The Gee's Bend quiltmakers, Raymond Saunders, Lynda Benglis, Alan Shields, Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten, Betye Saar. A star map and cartography for when no map today makes sense. A song of the universe, played on a toy piano. Fragments of still lifes touching on the strange status of food as ornament, an abundance of grapes staged for show, then left to spoil, as storms rage on.

Distant Sound Effects (2026), another mosaic, incorporates a reproduction of Cézanne's apples, the building block of image-making in modernity. As T.J. Clark writes of Cézanne, the artist's project was to register (rather than depict) the unstable experience of perceiving a new era. "The feeling, goddamnit, was the thing to be painted." Perhaps the same can be said of Icecold's mandate, albeit as a sculptor: instead of representing the present, their work holds its instability in tactile relief. If prophecy cannot protect the role of the artist, they, too, will become a relic. Perhaps this is what forewarning feels like: their effigies encase a vulnerable stuffed elephant, or bunny, or self, in luminous, archival wax, protecting a sacred quality where the soft can harden, but the hard can also remain soft.

Faith Icecold (b. 1989, New York) lives and works in Queens, NY. Icecold’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Adams and Ollman, Portland (2026); Below Grand, New York (2025); Foreign & Domestic, New York (2025); Bibeau Krueger (2024); Et. al., San Francisco, CA (2023); and Bridget Donahue, New York (2022). They have had solo shows at Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2020) and HOUSING, New York, NY (2023) as well as a two-person show with Caleb Jamel Brown at take it easy, Atlanta, GA (2023). Icecold was a 2018 recipient of the Studio Immersion Project (SIP) Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.