Izzy Peterson

About the Artist

Izzy Peterson lives in Frederick, MD and attends undergraduate classes in St. Mary’s City, MD. In May of 2019 she is expected to earn her B.A. from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in Art with a minor in Film & Media Studies. In the fall of 2017 she took classes in art history and film studies at Queen Mary’s University of London in London, England. Her artwork involves multiple artistic disciplines such as painting, drawing, digital media, photography, animation, and film. The works she has completed for her senior thesis Tracing My Lineage: Reinterpreting Photographs to Construct an Alternate Family Story and her series of “memory paintings” grapple with the construction of history and memory and how this construction can be depicted visually. In the future Izzy hopes to earn her M.F.A. in either Film Studies or Production Design.  

Artist's Statement

A memory is difficult to capture. It is not a fixed, singular image, instead taking the form of a series of blurred, fleeting moments. In my paintings I have captured my memories and trapped them on canvas. I seek to portray memories and the vague and fabricated forms they take within my mind by combining the individual segments of a memory into one composition. They are painted onto large-scale canvases, making them larger than they are in my mind. Like the Fauvist painters of the early twentieth century, I employ an emotion-fueled use of color to impose my subjectivity on my subjects and reflect the emotions I associate with them. The amalgamation of synthetic, candy-like imagery that results from these processes both represents my memories and shines a light on the mythical, fabricated nature of memory itself.