faculty
Isabel Magowan
faculty

Isabel Magowan

Isabel Magowan was raised in Manhattan and currently works and lives in Brooklyn. She received a BA in History from Wesleyan University in 2011 and an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2015. Through photography and video, she attempts to unlock the impact that codified social norms have on forming the belief systems that underlie our personal interactions (although she admits that this very statement is adhering to certain “normative” behavior about how she should present her work). Her work often addresses concepts of beauty, expectation, excess and being in the public eye—issues that stem from her formative experience as a child performer. The universality of her work, despite its aesthetics, is in the vulnerability of her subjects. Her photographs seek to probe rather than dismiss the artificial constructs of our lives, creating ambiguities that defy easy resolution. Mental health, female identity, and fantasy are central themes within the artist’s video work. Whether through playfulness or absurdity, Magowan creates her own worlds with its own systems of logic that begin to reveal the nebulous boundaries between dream, desire, and delusion. Her strong emphasis on color, gesture, and mood transfer over in the editorial assignments she shoots, which too, ask questions not just of the subject but of the viewer. Her work has been featured in numerous digital and print publications and has been exhibited at Regen Projects (Los Angeles), Red Hook Labs (New York) and Danziger Gallery (New York) to name a few.