Education
Isabela Reyes-Klein holds a BFA in Art and Technology with a Fine Arts concentration from Mills College (2022), completed while concurrently enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. They are currently based in New Orleans, pursuing a J.D. at Tulane University with a focus on entertainment law, positioning their practice at the nexus of creative production and legal discourse.
Reyes-Klein has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at Hey! (New Orleans), Holland Project Gallery (Reno), and the Nevada Museum of Art Film Festival. Their work has been included in group exhibitions at Babylon Burning (San Francisco), Slide Space Gallery (Oakland) and Mills College Art Museum, among others. A recipient of the Nancy Cook Photography Fellowship (Mexico City), Reyes-Klein has collaborated on performances with experimental collectives such as MOCREP and Octophonia, extending their practice into the realms of sound, performance, and expanded media.
About
Reyes-Klein’s practice operates at the intersection of the digital and the material, forging a dynamic interplay between virtual residues and tangible forms. Through a meticulous process of accumulation, fragmentation, and recomposition, their work engenders multisensory visual, audio, and haptic interactions—exploring the thresholds of perception, memory, and mediated experience.
Reyes-Klein transforms accidental photos, a digital diary, and advertisements into meditative engagements with the external. Deeply invested in the ontological tensions between ephemerality and permanence, Reyes-Klein transforms incidental digital artifacts—accidental photographs, algorithmic detritus, and advertising intrusions—into intuitive explorations of form, gesture, and color and borne from tessellations of digital waste.
Their compositions navigate the inherent contradictions of duality: presence and absence, saturation and void, legibility and dissolution. Through vibrant chromatic interventions and gestural symbolism, their work renders the digital as a locus of both rupture and intimacy, interrogating the ever-fluid relationship between technological mediation and corporeal reality.
Engaging a broad material lexicon that spans video, sculpture, performance, installation, and works on paper, Reyes-Klein’s artistic inquiry is anchored in ritualistic repetition, fantastical and iterative deconstruction, and the phenomenology of the mundane. Their speculative aesthetics chart the tensions between wholeness and fragmentation, the recursive nature of memory, and the linguistic architectures of love, loss, and longing. Through performative gestures and site-responsive interventions, they construct liminal spaces that blur the boundaries between self and structure, the personal and the collective, embodiment and abstraction.
Heavily informed by their Jewish and Mexican heritage, American upbringing, and queer identity, Reyes-Klein’s practice subverts hegemonic narratives of completeness and certainty. Their work navigates the spectral nature of cultural inheritance, utilizing the slippages of language and form to renegotiate histories, imaginaries, and speculative futures.