Isabella Convertino – to shoot the sun

A man rests his hands on his belt, the sun shines from its buckle.
A length of cord strung taught from a tree
A patch of parched earth, dessicated plants struggle to hold their own amongst the wasted soil.
The skin of a pale teenager's back is almost as white as his shorts. He lies crouched over, his back bent, his ribs just showing through the thin skin.
A ball of cut hair on a sheet of kitchen towel.
A rolling lawn leads up a small house on a hill in a scene reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth's painting, 'Far From Needham'.
Two shirtless young men stand on the manicured lawn of an American suburb. They appear like ancient athletes, the first contorts his body round to hurl a frisbee, the second stands tall, watching.
A young deer, a tag on its ear and its forelegs bound, bleeds out on the boot of a truck.
The body of a man lies supine amongst a tangle of undergrowth.

to shoot the sun is both a reflection upon my personal traumas and experiences with masculine energies, and an investigation of male privilege within American suburbia. I am interested in containing and studying male power — observing its growth and erosion, sourcing its construction and relegation. In this body of work, I forge suburban geographies to create a terrarium, one in which I am able to direct and deconstruct performances of gender. Through formal uniformities, each image implicates its subjects in an immobility and overexposure, slowly working to align episodes and spaces of privilege with a death.

Born in 1998, Isabella Convertino is a young artist residing in New York and Connecticut. She is currently engaged in undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, United States. Her work has been published by ROMAN NVMERALS press, and was recently acquired by the MoMA library. Convertino’s images speak to the complications of adolescence, compounding memory and trauma as points of departure. Interested in the interplay between familial and gender structures, her work probes modes of power inheritance, distribution, and relegation.