Drawing on Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin for inspiration as much as artistic forebears like H.C. Westermann, Martin Honert, and Honoré Daumier, the young Philadelphia artist Isaac Resnikoff produces informed, handcrafted satire in wood and mixed-media sculptures and drawings. At once earnestly celebrating and wittily lampooning tenets of American history and ideology, Resnikoff appropriates and expands upon American folk and high-art traditions and technologies from Shaker construction to Modernist sculpture. By mining both vernacular culture and textbook histories alike, he manages to impeach those qualities of contemporary America that he finds unsavory by memorializing a bygone halcyon era—however flawed—of rough-and-rowdy revolutionaries, scientist statesmen, and hobo poets.

With humble materials—plywood, paint, fabric, and paper—Resnikoff articulates a grand, but homegrown vision of a nation of contradictions, both preserving and inventing folklores to illuminate a shadowy collective past and explore an uncertain shared future.