ABOUT

Twin Cities-based artist Isabelle McCormick employs traditional oil painting techniques and sculptural relief to render virtual space. At the intersection of technology and art history, she examines the relationship between self-surveillance and feminine archetypes that persist across the social media screenscape. Combining gold leaf, glitter, and Swarovski crystals with plaster casts and cake decorating techniques, she cultivates a tactile materiality that imitates self-branding. In a hyperbolic world of retouching apps and reality TV, McCormick explores the scopophilic pleasure in curating an online image and consequent chasm between the bodily self and social media façade.

Isabelle McCormick received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She is a graduate of the Brown University | Rhode Island School of Design Dual Degree Program, where she earned a BFA with Honors in Painting and magna cum laude BA in Literary Arts. McCormick spent two years in her mother’s native Rome, Italy serving as the Resident Fellow for Rhode Island School of Design’s European Honors Program. She has exhibited her work nationally in New York, Detroit, Providence, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and San Diego, as well as abroad in Japan, Italy, Greece, and Lebanon. Her first international solo show opened December 2021 in Beirut. Mirror, Mirror—her first major solo show stateside—opened last September at Belle Isle Viewing Room in Detroit.