Isaiah Davis’s Midtown Manhattan studio was once Christian Louboutin’s atelier, and it still has red carpeting that evokes the lacquered undersides of the designer’s signature stilettos. Projected onto its surface was a film that prominently featured a Black man in a leather jacket bearing an NYPD patch. Davis’s sculptures evoke the ways materials morph across time, and act as a prism through which to consider notions around masculinity, queerness, and Blackness. Perhaps this is why steel, a material that can be melted and remade again and again, is his other medium of choice. “The whole thing is about transformation—these things appearing one way, when in reality, there’s something else: serious durability,” Davis said.