Isa Gagarin

Untitled Triptych. Acrylic, watercolor, watersoluble crayon, earth pigment, collage on paper. 22” x 30” each. (2019)

Isa is one of 7 visual artists included in the HAIRandNAILS pop-up group show opening May 5 at 9 Herkimer Place in Brooklyn, NY.

Isa Gagarin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores subjects including color, natural phenomena, and autobiography. Using painting, drawing, site-specific installation, performance, and video, Gagarin explores color relationships with an emphasis on impermanence. The transient qualities of natural phenomena such as solar eclipses, tides, and rainbows prompt Gagarin to draw connections between her work and personal-political experiences of place in Hawai’i and Guam. Gagarin holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (2018) and a BFA in Painting from Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2008).

“Generated from my work-in-progress, Periphery(Not pictured but to be included in the show HAIRandNAILS at 9 Herkimer) is an assemblage of shapes made of scraps and trimmings. While working, I tack up these leftover bits along the outer edges and corners of my studio walls. Set aside: stacks of yellow crescents and irregular triangles, a dark blue and translucent rectangle with scalloped edges, pale green squares of torn paper. They wait in a holding pattern, not uninteresting enough to be cast out with the rubbish, and not yet chosen to be featured in a composition. During the creative process, I have found that it is in those spaces–the margins and the periphery of the Work–that my cautious inhibition falls away. Colors and shapes are stacked, paired, arranged, shuffled, re-arranged, layered. They are dynamic and impermanent. What does decentralization look like? The periphery of sight is an arc. When I try to bring these free and uninhibited forms into my field of vision, they threaten to be eclipsed.”