"Beacon" series
“Beacon", Solo Exhibition at Western New Mexico University, Silver City, 2022
Recipient of the Edwina and Charles Milner Grant Award for this Exhibition and Lecture Series.
The exhibition “Beacon", is a series of work consisting of paintings, silkscreens, floating mylar, plexiglass silhouettes, colored light, and projected video by New Mexico-based artist Isadora Stowe. This exhibition seeks to immerse an audience with opportunities to engage in how we construct our own realities, and designate meaning. The ideas in this work are reflective of the artist’s interest in the processes and negotiations of constructed identity, and how we illuminate personal narratives.
This exhibition creates aesthetic resonance in our relationships to locality and how we tell the stories about the intersections within our lives. These tenants that inform Stowe’s work are told through a series of repeated syntax and narrative codes. The syntax characters are at times literal such as airplanes, maps, etc. and other times they merge into the abstract and surreal. They are consistent visual language, made of one hundred and one characters (and growing) that are articulated through repetition within scale and material applications.
In Beacon these characters articulated in various scale and medium are combined with colored light, to create a layer of colored shadows that change as the light changes within the room and within the shadow of the viewer. Light sensitive paint on various artworks
reveal their characters with the transformation of the daylight. Colored light gels over the galleries three large skylights provide dissipated color light that changes over the course of the suns schedule. At night colored light gels on the lights reveal another light experience. Viewers are provided with small portable black light flashlights to help reveal additional layers of “glow in the dark” painted and silkscreened imagery, in essence searching with their own beacons. By giving the viewer agency with a tool that reveals more of the story, inviting a dialogue and relationship shift. This installation combines to create participation in an other worldly account of a narrative that the viewer finds themselves
making their own connections, questions, and shared meaning.
Artist Lecture and Community programming and events Jan. 20-Feb.17, 2022,
Gallery Artist Talk also streamed live Jan. 20th, 6:30 pm at Light Hall, link to talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW3igO9WX1k
Reception to follow at 7:30 pm. Beacon Closing Event "Art in the Dark", Feb. 17th, 6:30 pm.
Find out more here: wnmu.edu/events/milner-women-in-the-art…