ISABEL BEAVERS is a transdisciplinary artist and creative producer based in Los Angeles. Her work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media.
Beavers’ work has been presented, exhibited, and screened nationally and internationally at Helsinki Design Week (2022), Last Frontier NYC (2022), Real Artilleria de Sevilla, Spain (2022), Heidi Duckler Dance (2022), Museum of Design Atlanta (2021), New York Hall of Science (2020), CultureHub LA (2020), SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery (2020), MIT Museum (2019), Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin Thaer-Institut (2018), Mountain Time Arts (2017) among others. They have held workshops at the Hammer Museum (2020) and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2019). She holds an MFA from the SMFA at Tufts University and a BS from the University of Vermont. She was the 2021 AICAD/NOAA Fisheries Art + Science Fellow, 2022 Creative Impact Lab Amman Lead Artist with ZERO1, and is the Artistic Director of SUPERCOLLIDER LA.
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.
