Luisa Rabbia (b. 1970 Italy) is a surreal storyteller who draws us out of our world into another with familiar narratives of the human condition. Her works are deeply rooted in drawing which she sees as a platform that unties rational construct with the imagination. In addition to works on paper, Rabbia has taken the traditional form of sculpture and developed it in a surprising way by creating three-dimensional drawings of fragile human figures enveloped in protective swaths of fabric in papier-mâché or porcelain, on which she draws--thus, the drawing becomes a skin. Her renderings and sculptural figures also are present as individual elements or animated in her video pieces.

Rabbia received a Master's degree from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, and trained as a studio assistant to artist Gilberto Zorio of the Arte Povera movement. She has had solo exhibitions at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, The Fondazione Merz, Turin, the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, the Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, the Associazione Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, The Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York, The Giorgio Persano Gallery, Turin, the Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston, and the Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Luisa Rabbia lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Turin, Italy.

Luisa Rabbia came to the museum in May 0f 2007 and spent hours looking at books, illustrations and drawings in the collection and archives. Rabbia became fascinated by photographs and ephemera that Isabella Stewart Gardner’s pasted in her travel scrapbook of her visit to China in1883. This album had recently been digitally photographed and Rabbia spent her residency delving into the high-quality files. During the following year, Rabbia used the photographs to reinterpret Gardner’s scrapbook and create one of her own; a video of an imaginary landscape animated with her drawings, video that she shot while in Boston, and images of objects in the collection that was set to an original soundtrack.

In 2008 Rabbia returned to the Gardner to install the 26 minute digital video in the Special Exhibition Gallery. Travels With Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008 is an atlas of memory, a moving collection of images that maps life in motion. Rabbia spoke about her work and residency with curator Pieranna Cavalchini and again in the gallery during a Gardner After Hours event with Fa Ventilato who composed the soundtrack for the digital video. In addition to this work, Rabbia created an artist book in conjunction with the exhibition and worked with Cavalchini and designer Isabel Meirelles to design an interactive micro-site of Rabbia’s scrapbook. The site uses the long strip of static images represented in the video. Marked on the image strip are points of access for the exploration of Rabbia’s creative process in making this movie.

Explore Luisa Rabbia's creative process through the Travels with Isabella microsite. The microsite requires Flash, opens in a new window, and is best viewed full screen. Download the latest version of Flash Player here.