About

Izzy Shinn is a Twin-Cities based printmaker and comic artist specializing in intaglio printmaking and ink illustration. Working in a graphic and often meticulous style, Shinn constructs extratemporal images that incorporate and merge visuals derived from 14th-century illuminated manuscripts, late 20th-century lesbian archival materials, and their own contemporary and stylized method of illustration. A historical and personal interplay has developed in their work as Shinn combines folkloric disciplines and fantasy elements with their own experiences as a butch lesbian and those connections with lesbian archive. Shinn is interested in the intersection of archive and storytelling—documentary and genre fiction—and how to utilize the visual language of the past to create new and compelling narratives informed by the present. Fundamentally, their work centers on relationships of the self, the other, and the world, mediating on fabricated folklore, false history objects, and the subsequent interpersonalities of things or people that do not exist—but perhaps could.