By: Catherine Polo
As COVID-19 spread across the country and forced many to quarantine in their homes, it gave many people a chance to indulge in creativity and do some deeper thinking. MU photography student Kylee Isom found herself investigating relationships that tethered the female body to domestic spaces and how representations of women were not always entirely within their control.
When Isom returned to MU, she got her 4-by-5 camera and got to work on self portraiture in her apartment. Isom said that unlike high art such as sculpture or painting, photography was considered low art when it was first introduced. This allowed women to have control within photography because it wasn’t valued as high art and was readily accessible to them.
“I’m really interested in art history and all of the females before me who used photography as a means of expression,” Isom said. “I was doing a lot of research and I was reading about Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman and all of the women who used photography as a means of reclaiming female identity and female voices … Using my 4-by-5 camera was kind of my line through history.”
Dylan Evins, Isom’s friend and roommate, said that at first, Isom’s work went over his head, but as he started familiarizing himself with her work and learning the societal issues that it addressed, it started to carry more meaning.
“Now I’m able to appreciate it almost more as a message, in that it’s conveyed with a lot of meaning in each photo … I’m always excited to see where she goes next,” Evins said. “Everything that I’ve seen her come up with so far, especially once she started to develop who she is as an artist, has all been pretty top-notch.”
Isom’s current work uses iconographic symbols, such as floral print, to redefine and reshape the female body. She uses shapewear, which is historically used as a means of smoothing and perfecting the body, to instead distort the body. Isom also obscures her identity in the photos as well as all parts of the body that are typically sexualized.
“I specifically obscure and take those away as a way to subvert the gaze and as a way to subvert the stereotypical standards of beauty and what it means to look beautiful in an image. That happens by physically distorting my face into this grotesque thing within the hosiery,” Isom said. “I see them less as images of my body and more as like I am a fixture of these images. I’m more of an object in these images, just some flesh.”
MU professor Joe Johnson taught Isom in his intermediate photography class and later in his advanced photography class. Johnson also hired Isom as the photo lab manager.
“She’s remarkably productive. One of the most productive people we’ve had, I’d say in half a decade. I have a sneaking suspicion that she is going to represent Mizzou well beyond our walls,” Johnson said. “She’s going to graduate and she’s going to make an impact in this field, and that has everything to do with how seriously she takes herself and her art practice.”
Isom said she uses a very intentional set of ingredients to make her photos, using the home space, domestic objects, shapewear, textiles and patterns to reference idealized femininity and the construction of identity.
“I found that by narrowing in on that language, I was able to communicate better in my work, and so that combination of things as a vessel of conversation really worked well for me,” Isom said. “My primary goal is to develop a language to talk about something that’s very hard to talk about, which is feminism today.”
To see more of Isom’s work, check her out on Instagram @kyleeisom.
_Edited by Angelina Edwards | aedwards@themaneater.com_