Isaac L. Stern

@isaacsternmetals

Isaac Stern is a metalsmith and interdisciplinary artist who explores how medical imaging and biomaterials craft the experience of the disabled body through installation. He translates scientific data into sculptural objects that challenge the medical gaze by (re)embodying experiences that are often abstract or invisible. He is currently pursuing his MFA at the Maine College of Art & Design after earning a BFA in Metalsmithing & Jewelry from the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, under the mentorship of Teresa Faris. Stern’s work has been exhibited at The Access/VSA Emerging Young Artists Program, a Jean Kennedy Smith Arts and Disability Program, at the Kennedy Center (Washington D.C.), SPACE Gallery (ME), The Silverfern Gallery (TN), Crossman Gallery (WI), and featured in publications including Grain of Salt Magazine and Queer Metalsmiths [queerphoria].

My practice investigates how crafted forms within an installation can collapse the distinction between the observer and observee. Grounded in the scientific literature on Carey-Fineman-Ziter Syndrome, CFZ(S), my work acknowledges the precision of molecular diagnosis while refusing its distance from embodiment. Through material, I translate genetic mutations into macro forms that resist fixity. Influenced by the “theory of entanglement”, I treat diagnostic technologies as forces that actively shape the narrative of identity. In response, craft becomes a critical methodology in “material thinking,” where slow, iterative handwork disrupts the medicalized demand for productivity and resolution. Rather than reproducing the medical body from data imaging, I invite a sense of self that the processes of diagnostics often exclude. By reframing the visual language of dimly lit museological displays, my installations confront institutional authority; creating a space where the specimen and the viewer may reflect on one another. My work positions disabled bodies not as objects of study but as producers of knowledge, agents who author their own visibility and enact (re)embodiment in response to the diagnostic framing that renders them as specimens.