Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, Collage, Sculpture, Curatorial, Design
Website: iannoli.com
Ivan Iannoli is an artist, designer, photographer, and educator based in San Francisco. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in New York in 2007 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011. He holds both US and Italian citizenship. After a decade of working and exhibiting in Southern California, he relocated to the Bay Area, where he has maintained a studio practice alongside sustained teaching and curatorial work.
Iannoli was an assistant professor of photography at the San Francisco Art Institute until the school’s closure in 2021. He has also taught at UC Davis, San José State University, and UCLA, and currently teaches as an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, working across the photography, first-year painting, and graduate fine arts programs, as well as teaching high school media arts. His courses have consistently focused on visual literacy and translation across media.
Alongside his studio work, Iannoli curates and runs an applied design practice, collaborating with artists, galleries, and small organizations on websites, visual systems, printed matter, and documentation photography. He curated Mock Sun at Bass & Reiner in San Francisco in 2023 and New Geographies at the Bolinas Museum in 2024, the latter bringing together thirteen artists to examine the artistic history of coastal Marin in relation to the wider creative landscape. His own work has been exhibited in California, New York, Mexico, and England, including at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, PØST, Khastoo Gallery, and New Wight Gallery in Los Angeles, and SIA Gallery in Sheffield.
Iannoli’s studio work centers on photographic materials and ideas, though it is rarely straight photography. He builds modest-scale assemblages that fold together photography, printmaking, collage, drawing, and sculpture, often layering pigment prints with cast acrylic, spray enamel, airbrush, shellac on hydrocal, and copper. The resulting objects resist assignment to any single medium, and the layering is used deliberately to obscure as much as it reveals: images sit behind and across one another on translucent supports, so that what is depicted stays slightly out of reach. Recurring preoccupations include transparency, transmission, and legibility, as well as decision-making, failure, and omission.
A persistent interest in art-historical quotation runs through the work. His 2016 solo exhibition at Bass & Reiner took Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic landscapes as source material, reproducing and then painting over them to push the originals one further remove away, and introduced his first projected light works, in which video animation was layered with painted glass to generate depth. Later projects, including the three-part exhibition that travelled between Mexico City and San Francisco in 2018, extended this logic into installation, with works rotated and rehung over the run of the show to keep generating new relationships between them. His broader interests in human potential and new age movements, in intention and aptitude, and in the inheritance of Pictorialism and Modernism give the work a cool, deadpan register beneath its material richness.
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