Feature by Alex Avgust
Photos by Madalyn Hay
After relentlessly hunting for a coffee shop open at 9 am on a Sunday, I met Isabelle in the Dodge tents— both of us hoping the enclosed space furbished with outdoor heaters would provide some much-needed relief from the persistent chill. Yet, such hopes were entirely fruitless and we soon decided to relocate to Low Steps, preferring the meager sunshine to the deceptive promises of warmth that lured us to the tents in the first place.
We started discussing the trajectory of her work, as she moved from more traditional mediums, such as painting and drawing, to incorporating multimedia elements, including quotidian items like household objects. This led to reaching her current predominant interest of pushing the boundaries between physical and digital spaces with creative coding projects, soundscapes, and video work.
Isabelle explains that the beginning of her painterly journey started in the early Tumblr days. She was drawn to the indie-pop, rock and grunge aesthetics, which she still sees as formative of her visual preferences.“It was a lot of American Apparel and skinny girls,” she explains. “There were a lot of idealized and romantic images of couples and beautiful flowers and impressionist paintings. But it was also darker stuff. Lots of self-mutilation and political anger and depression-related content…” Looking back at her early work, she remembers a really painful sense of self-criticism that went into the process of creating, seeing it as both cruel yet ultimately profound and possibly over-romanticized.
David and His Brother, 2022
As Isabelle’s work developed, she stepped away from strictly adhering to prescribed stylistic choices already circulating in online spaces and started to explore the medium of paint itself. Experimenting with the physical medium led her to start experimenting with subject matter, finding inspiration in the works of Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville.
The questions she asked herself about her work also changed, progressing from “What makes an image good?” to “What makes a painting a painting?” as opposed to, for instance, an illustration. She explains she made a conscious effort to step away from derivative and overused images, rather leaning into the intuitive nature of the physical process.
Mother in June, 2020
She continued to engage with the physicality of the medium, especially interested in texture, while also starting to explore multimedia approaches. Her piece Mother in June incorporates twine in the foreground and a bathmat in the background.
She kept engaging with other painterly qualities such as movement, especially in her piece Whitney — a disorienting figure painting that challenges the boundaries between representation and abstraction. Her most recent painterly work has been influenced by Richard Diebenkorn and Alice Neel’s aesthetics. “In the future I want to maybe calm down a bit with color. I think there is a lot of maturing to do in my work, in every aspect. But I’m not sure I’ll ever get somewhere comfortable. Maybe that’s the process,” she concludes. [4]
Whitney, 2019
As an anthropology and visual art concentrator, Isabelle expressed that she views the two disciplines as deeply interconnected. Her paintings focus on individuals: their bodies, their relationships to them as well as the manner in which their bodies interact with their respective environments— environments which include other bodies as well. Likewise, she finds her own relationships and environment to play a large role in her creative process. She describes struggling to find motivation due to the isolation of the past year, finding an environment with other creatives to be much more conductive than trying to create in isolation.
Another prominent component to her work includes the exploration of domestic spaces: kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms, all of which have an intimate connection with the bodies that occupy them. As places of both comfort and conflict, these domestic spheres provide a ripe ground for exploring the relationships between community, individuals and art. She describes these spaces as both private and universal, taking special interest in them now that most of us spend the majority of our time in our homes.
She recalls a carefree childhood memory of eating pomegranates in the bathtub. “My mom used to get us pomegranates— but they stain everything! So one of my favorite childhood memories is my mom would slice the pomegranate, put me and my sister in the bathtub and we would just sit there and gnaw on the pomegranate—It didn’t matter how messy it was because we were in the bathtub.”
Into The Space and Night, 2022
Yet not all spaces she is interested in exploring are physical ones. She sees digital environments as equally rich in culture and interpersonal connections. While her interest in online culture is evident in her early work, she says this curiosity was reinvigorated during the pandemic: “I got super disenchanted with politics and kind of everything else. Covid, post-George Floyd protests, I was just really pessimistic about everything. It made me think of the internet and technology in a new way.”
She started to see digital spaces as sources of solace and connection. Her view of our increasingly digital social landscape is far more optimistic than that of most. She sees social media and technology as a tool to overcome conventional bounds of identity and transcend corporal restrictions: “I have hope about the internet and technology but I also don’t wanna make it seem all puppies and rainbows.” Like all spaces Isabelle deals with in her work, the internet is a contested, complex, and often contradictory site of culture. She sees it as both a root cause of a lot of issues our generation has internalized due to early exposure and a source of hope for a more inclusive and egalitarian future.
Still from Weird Core Bedroom Snowflake. Processing. 2021
Her digital work continues to engage with the idea of spaces and their relationality. Her piece Weird Core Bedroom Snowflake. Processing. simulates a liminal space through the intersection of found images, creative writing, and creative coding. Isabelle discovered her interest in art through writing; the first time she practiced art around other creatives was at the California State Summer School for the Arts Summer Program for creative writing her sophomore year of high school. The creative community aspect of the program inspired her to pursue visual arts. Even though her practice has become far more visual since she still finds solace in writing. This piece in particular shines a light on the fact that even though there seems to be a clear trajectory in Isabelle’s work––going from traditional mediums to digital formats––her past and future work are deeply interconnected. She describes the piece as evocative of early Tumblr culture, rooted in the liminality of the internet as a social space, a call back to her earlier styles.
Her soundscapes explore the cultural shift from heavily visual media such as TV to sound-based forms like podcasts. Her work explores the reason for this technological shift in our ability to separate ourselves from external stimuli, or rather the lack thereof. As Isabelle says: “You can close your eyes, but you can never close your ears.” Much of her audio work is uncanny and unsettling, resting in the liminal space her visual digital work has carved out. In the future, she is interested in incorporating narrative components into her audio work, both working with and subverting the nature of the medium. One example of challenging the prescribed format addresses the fact that there is a clear beginning and a clear end to each piece. In her digital work, Isabelle finds inspiration in the works of Joshua Citarella. She is especially fascinated by his research concerning online political spaces and how his anthropological and journalistic approach intersects with his visual artistic practice.
Lucy, 2019
Currently, Isabelle is producing a student film, taking digital music classes, and curating memes. The student film, written by Jane Summer Walsh, tells the story of a low-income student leaving her hometown for college. The day she is meant to depart, however, someone steals her pet turtle. The story follows her as she attempts to find her missing pet and give it a good home before leaving. “It’s so sweet and it’s so smart and it’s so funny and I have so much respect for Jane as a creative writer,” Isabelle exclaims. “I also run a really small meme account,” she goes on to say, “I think that might be art? It’s mostly curation. I don’t make most of them. It’s pretty edgy though…I made it private.” (@wat.rcup)
More of Isabelle’s work can be found at: https://isabelledamico.com