Back Room Experiments and other Experiments
To mark the completion of her doctoral research in 2012, Isabella produced Back Room Experiments and Other Experiments, a book which examined her site-based works from 2008-2012 in Los Angeles, Paris, Washington DC and Norwich.
My Plan To Rob The Getty
Electronic proposal document (2011)
Between 2009 and 2011, Isabella made several research trips to the Getty Institute to look at the Werner von Nekes collection of optical instruments. One of the resulting works was this proposal for testing the Getty’s security system.
Anatomy of A Shot
Digital video (2009)
An unnamed detective investigates a mysterious shooting in a lemon grove in Ventura County, California. A trail of clues led to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Santa Monica Pier, the Viper Room, Mulholland Drive and other iconic Hollywood locations.
Counterspells
“The spell was first cast in the arcades”
Slide projection (2012)
A visual investigation of Walter Benjamin’s Paris using the techniques of the Arcades Project.
These Strange Tableaux
Digital prints (2011)
A research trip to Tynemouth Toy Museum in search of Cold War era toys resulted in this documentation of the strange scenarios and situations composed by the curators. Reminiscent of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, there’s more at stake than the documentation of toys and fashions. There’s an uncanny dance, a gap for the imagination, an implication of all sorts of unspoken things, strange and deliberate.
In Camera
Nine digital prints (2011)
“I had an argument about Freud which left me crying in the street in a strange part of Manhattan.I travelled to Coney Island on the trail of Zoê Beloff’s Coney Island Amateur Psycho-analytic Society and the use of fiction and fictionalisation in art.”
Iron Curtain
Digital print (2010), works on the idea of border, from Hadrian’s Wall Residency.
Perfect Moon
Digital print (2009)
A series of camera obscura / digital hybrids from the Experiments with Light and Lenses series, from 2008-9.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Digital video (2009), 60 minutes
An hour-long video documenting the light changes during the ‘golden hour’ in Santa Paula – the early film capital of California – Nothing Gold Can Stay considers the role of California’s natural assets in the state’s involvement in the military-industrial-entertainment edifice.
Rocket
Found objects (2011)
Deep in the Rhoda Bubendey Metraux archive at the Library of Congress, Isabella found the drawings and notes from her Image of The Scientist and Sputnik projects of the 1950s and 1960s. She responded to these descriptions and drawings with objects, here in silver foil and sausage-meat.