Izzy Losskarn

Isabella Losskarn is an emerging visual artist from Asheville, North Carolina. 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. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Georgia working in drawing and painting.

Izzy’s pastel drawings make use of striking, absurd visual metaphors to communicate with audiences on gender-related topics. Using soft pastels, pastel pencils, and blending tools, their 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 Izzy’s work, purposeful and jarring; she mimics the ways in which popular culture distorts perceptions of gender.

Working exclusively from artist-captured reference photographs, Izzy 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, their 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.

Research Detail

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.