My artistic practice is influenced by hip-hop music and personal experiences growing up in Columbus, Ohio, LA, and Camden, New Jersey. I consider my process as a type of remixing, similar to how a sound engineer or producer would sample hooks, beats, or choruses to create new music. I collage materials such as Backwoods, Swishers Sweets, magazines, historical archives, and personal memorabilia in conjunction with symbols, colors, and patterns to framework my art.

 I was fourteen when it happened. Awoken one morning by the smell of my biological mother’s cooking in Cameroon (to this day, still the best breakfast of my life), then falling asleep that evening in a foreign land as an “African American.” Suddenly, everything was unfamiliar. The classification of bodies based on skin was not discussed in Cameroon—we were just humans in spaces. It was the first time the color of my skin affected the color of my suit.

  Clothing is a language that speaks for people before they even say a word. As an immigrant in America seeking a sense of belonging, however, I often dress to blend in, and so I feel that my wardrobe has a limited vocabulary. I’ve silenced a part of my true self that I’m curious to rediscover. In wondering what person I would become if I didn’t care about the unspoken rules of dress and behavior, I came up with the solution to paint myself in borrowed outfits and accessories on canvases, where rules and norms don’t apply.

 My painting explores the psychology of the individual. The characters engage in violent acts, while apathetic bystanders witness the macabre scene. Since childhood, I have faced the struggle between the private drama versus the public persona. My family escaped Poland when I was five years old. We all lived in a single room in Berlin. To blend in at a very prestigious private school, I learned to “put on a mask” and hide the embarrassing reality of my home life. Similar to a film director, I compose narratives to develop an uncanny dramatic scene.

 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.

 My paintings are positioned between an image and its double. In the same way that an illuminated object casts a shadow, a re-rendered image casts a semiotic shadow. My decision to work in monochrome speaks to the desire to depict the energy of these moving shadows. The drip, the blot, the smear, and the quotational nature of my images gesture toward abstract expressionism and the graphic novel. They acknowledge the hybrid nature of printed and digital imagery (specifically, television screens, advertising, and logos).

  My current series, Your Ass Sucks Buttermilk. I Herd It Through The Bovine. Feat. Big Dairy and Nestlé, explores issues concerning big dairy, capitalism, nutrition, and social awareness through a surrealist tradition. By integrating surrealist strategies, this work exposes contemporary social issues through dreamlike, strange, and satirical narratives.

 These works deal with a variety of subject matter—groups of people interacting in specific ways, our desire and ability to alter the greater landscape, and how me might be perceived by an intelligence that was unaware of us as individuals with desires, hopes, and fears.

 I cannot stand to watch sheets of paper run through printers, plotting ink. It is ink on paper. Call it a print but not a photograph. There is light in the decisive moment; however, there is no light in its nal conception. It is incomplete. I do not want to participate in such a process, so I paint.

I work with glass as it is remnant of my former photographic practice. Glass acts as a vehicle on which to make photographs, and it serves as their container, protecting the finished print.

 At a moment in which public education is highly contested, both threatened and threatening, we often see school furniture as a stand-in for student bodies. I make observational paintings in public schools, teachers unions, and other bureaucratic spaces. The corners of desks, floor tiles, papers, and chairs are the focus of my attention. The slippery, textural paint application that I use to depict hard surfaces alludes to the ways in which our idiosyncratic humanness can break through within the constraints of educational institutions.