"illuminated"
“illuminated”, Isadora Stowe solo exhibition
El Paso Museum of Art
Oct. 20, 2022-March 12, 2023
Opening Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022
Artist Talk, Jan. 25, 2023, EP Museum Auditorium
The exhibition “illuminated”, is a series of work consisting of paintings, silkscreens, floating mylar, plexiglass silhouettes colored light, and projected video and sound 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. This work focuses on the constructions of self and how we illuminate our own narratives. The ideas in this work are reflective of the artist’s interest in the processes and negotiations of constructed identity.
Her fascinations are within the relationships between borders, real or imagined, and reconstructions of memory. This exhibition seeks to create esthetic resonance in our relationships to locality and how we tell the stories about the intersections within our lives. These tenants that inform her work are told through a series of repeated syntax and narrative codes. The syntax characters are at times literal such as airplanes, maps, and houses 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.
These characters articulated in various scales and mediums on the walls and ceiling 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. The sounds that emanate from each piece are made by the application of paint on the surface of the artwork, and abstracted recordings of the subject matter of the iconography made by the artist Brack Morrow (www.brackmorrow.org) with samples of sounds from Isadora's family, friends, travels and habitation.
The interactive experience of the viewer is important to the artist. While standing in front of the artworks, sound moves in and out changing by the movement of the viewer, who is also supplied with a small portable black light flashlight to help reveal additional layers of“glow in the dark” painted and silkscreened imagery. In essence viewers are searching with their own beacons, giving them agency with a tool that reveals more of the story, inviting dialogue and a relationship shift to the art experience. This installation culminates in an invitation for participation in an other worldly account of a narrative that the viewer finds themselves making with their own connections, questions, and shared meaning.
WATCH A WALKTHROUGH OF THE EXHIBITION HERE.
ARTIST TALK ABOUT "ILLUMINATED" VIEWED HERE.
Glasstire Review of Exhibition Link to Article
University of Texas at El Paso Prospector Interview about ExhibitionLink to Article
El Paso Times Interview About ExhibitionLink to article