ISABEL BEAVERS is a transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Their work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media.
Beavers' work addresses the climate crisis at the intersection of queerness, more-than-humans, spirituality, and technology. Most recently their projects have explored the eco-social implications of deep sea mining, marine health in the Puget Sound, and mega-fires in California. Beavers’ work has been presented, exhibited, and screened nationally and internationally. They hold an MFA from the SMFA at Tufts University and a BS from the University of Vermont. They were the 2021 AICAD/NOAA Fisheries Art + Science Fellow, 2022 Creative Impact Lab Amman Lead Artist with ZERO1. They are the Artistic Director of SUPERCOLLIDER LA and 2024-25 Hixon Riggs Early Career Fellow in STS At Harvey Mudd College.
View CV.
Isabel Presenting at CultureHub LA for The Paradise Dioramas, 2020
Statement + Process
I generate video works, 3D animation, sculptures and immersive spaces that center embodied knowledge and ask viewers to rely on sense-making as a primary mode for constructing reality.
My work attempts to combat systems of oppression as they relate to ecology, bodies and environments, instead imagining new climate futures. Through site-responsive research and artistic projects I interrogate cultural responses to climate change, speculate about climate futures, and question the ethics of emergent technologies.
The environments I create, call into question typical sense hierarchies: shifting scale of image or object, emphasizing listening in dark spaces, and challenging perception of virtual and physical. My work proposes new methods of storytelling that integrate many epistemologies--data science, oral history, science fiction, embodied knowledge and new materialisms--and create space for generating new ways of being.
Recent projects have explored the unraveling of the Arctic Ocean ecosystem, embedded power structures in Icelandic origin stories and Norse Mythology, mega-fires in California as a case study for the operation of compassion fatigue, and curatorial projects addressing extraction, artificial intelligence, and artificial ecologies.
