ABOUT

New York-based artist Isabelle McCormick employs traditional oil painting techniques, textured acrylic, and sculptural relief to render virtual space. At the intersection of technology and art history, she examines the relationship between ever-increasing surveillance and feminine archetypes persistent across the digital screenscape. Combining gold leaf, glitter, and crystal rhinestones with cake decorating techniques and plaster relief, McCormick cultivates a tactile materiality that imitates self-branding. In a hyperbolic world of retouching apps and reality TV, McCormick explores the scopophilic pleasure of curating an online image and consequent chasm between the embodied self and social media façade.

Isabelle McCormick is a doctoral student and Painting and Drawing Studio Fellow at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research draws upon human and social psychology, art history, gender studies, and cultural studies in technology, to unpack how we regard ourselves differently through the psychological environments we inhabit online. 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 paintings throughout the US and abroad, with solo exhibitions at Août Gallery in Beirut and Belle Isle Viewing Room in Detroit. She has participated in international art fairs such as NADA New York, and her work has been featured in New American Paintings. McCormick’s next solo exhibition opens August 28 at Night Club Gallery in St. Paul, Minnesota.