Gabrielle McNally

Gabrielle McNally's artistic instincts have evolved throughout her career from opera performance to two-dimensional media and her eventual exposure to time-based art and video. This latter mode of creating melds all of her previous encounters with art into one form and permits her to explore and utilize all aspects of her creative thought. Currently a graduate student in the Film/Video Production program at University of Iowa, McNally considers her education a means to continue expanding her creative depth and personal calling through both critical studies and practice. McNally works in a conceptual and process-based manner. She finds inspiration for her work through personal inquiry and literary research. By working in a time-based medium, she is finally able to envelop the concept of experience instead of freezing it in a frame. Through McNally's work, she intends to create viewer participation via a resonating emotional response of self-awareness and presence in the viewer post-experience with the work. Her goal is to sustain the relationship of the viewer to the ideas present in the work for him/her to better understand the relationship he/she has to the concepts present in the piece. The work is also meant to induce empathy and push the viewer to consider every individual on earth a vessel ripe with stories. McNally's life philosophy is that nothing is intrinsically ugly or despicable. She has spent her life searching for beauty in the darkness. Her work focuses on the idea of the dual quality of fear and attraction: two diverse images working together to create a new and beautiful, albeit dark, juxtaposed image. Through McNally's work, she has discovered that art is the manifestation of ego as well as a love and fear of God, faith, nature, and humanity.