Ideas and images of masculinity and femininity permeate many aspects of life in the 21st century, with popular products, media, fashion, and politics often attempting to define the lines between genders. In an effort to heighten engagement within the broader discourse of gender and gendered experiences, Isabella Losskarn creates highly colorful drawn images of distinctly familiar and absurd still-life scenarios that exist as a set of universally relatable visual metaphors which address current issues and experiences personal to the artist.
Through this absurd manipulation of familiar objects, imagery and themes which are often associated with gender stereotypes, a dialogue is created, and audiences are invited to view and understand each artwork through the lens of their own personal experience.
Just like the presence of gender stereotypes, misogyny and sexism in politics and popular culture, you’ve seen and experienced the objects which appear in Losskarn’s drawings before - it is even possible that they exist in your memories or personal life.
Artist Biography
Isabella Losskarn is an emerging visual artist based in Athens, Georgia. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, and she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing, as well as a Bachelor of Art History in December 2021 from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Born in 1999, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Losskarn grew up in a way that was synchronous with technological and societal change. Coming of age in the early 2000’s, she has experienced firsthand how the portrayal of gender stereotypes in mass media and popular culture can influence one’s own perception of gender. Confused by a lack of honest dialogue and unequal representations of gender in the media, at home, and at school, as a teenager Losskarn became motivated to use art as a way to communicate an understanding of the impacts of gendered experiences to broad audiences.
Now, navigating these gender stereotypes as an adult, Losskarn’s pastel drawings make use of striking, absurd visual metaphors to communicate with her audience on gender-related topics. Using soft pastels, pastel pencils, and blending tools, Losskarn’s work encompasses a wide variety of strangely manipulated pop-culture subject matter, rendered with detail and color which pushes the boundaries of hyperrealism. This manipulation of pop-culture objects appears consistently in Losskarn’s work, purposeful and jarring; she mimics the ways in which popular culture distorts perceptions of gender.
Working exclusively from artist-captured reference photographs, she collects and spends time with each of the objects seen in her drawings before they are placed in a composition and photographed. Rooted heavily in the regular study of gender-based research, the artist’s studio practice pulls from personal and anonymous gendered experiences in an effort to address a specific absurdity— the circumstances and consequences of the overwhelming presence of gendered stereotypes, ideas and imagery in our daily life.
“My artwork confronts the idea of gender and all of the absurdities associated with it— how gender constantly impacts our daily lives, the existence and use of gender stereotypes in media and popular culture, and how different people perceive and live gender in different ways.” -Isabella Losskarn
