Isis Hockenos

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

Using oil paint, india ink, colored pencil and gouache, I explore ideas of loss, mortality, shape shifting, identity, queerness and transformation. In my recent work (2024-present) I employ repetition and mirror imagery both as devices to explore my own tendencies toward psychological repetition and as visual tools that disrupt the viewer’s relationship to space and time. Images bump into one another or strain to detangle. Are we, as viewers, peering up from the bottom of a bucket of eels? If so, we simultaneously remain observers, smirking at the sexual nature of the creatures and the trope of a man proudly displaying his big fish. There is familiarity in repetition, and with it comes learning and mastery, as seen in the two final images done in colored pencil, but we can also look at the illusory truth effect, wherein repetition makes something feel truer, and in doing so pulls farther away from reality. But then, my favorite art is always the art that feels truer than the world visible to the naked eye. The first time we recognized ourselves in a mirror could be called the birth of the ego and a key step in the development of self-hood through the process of objectification. In a painting of dueling figures, are we seeing two states of the same individual or separate entities in relationship? And here we can insert too the Jungian archetype and Edward Edinger’s belief that for modern humans, an understanding of the archetypes within ourselves are as close as we’ll come...

Artwork