Bobbi Meier is a Chicago-based visual artist. Life’s frustrations, joys, and fears are embedded into her abstract sculptures, drawings, and installations through provocative use of materials including; pantyhose, spandex, porcelain, and found home furnishings. Ms. Meier has been awarded residencies at; The John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Program, The Ragdale Foundation, The Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist’s Residency, Anderson Ranch, and Sanskriti-Kendra, in New Delhi. Her work has been widely exhibited regionally and nationally and is in the collection of the Kohler Foundation and John Michael Kohler Art Center. She is a co-director of ADDS Donna artist-run space. She earned her MA in Art Education (2000), and MFA in Fiber and Material Studies (2011), from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sex, secrets, and Surgery provide the impetus for abstract body-referential sculptures, photo-based collage, and installations created as emotional repositories to life situations which cannot be changed. Growing up in the Midwest, raised by a Southern Belle and a NY prep- school Catholic; proper manners, keeping the “dirty laundry” hidden away, and repressed sensuality are important underpinnings to my work.

I create voyeuristic invitations to visit uncomfortable situations with desire and embarrassment towards the body. Manipulating sexually loaded materials — spandex and pantyhose, bits of lace, porcelain, and gel medium — provocative forms question viewers perceptions. Organic shapes allude to creases and folds of the body. A dichotomy of seduction and revulsion exists, where fragments are re-constructed to become assemblages of grotesque beauty. Hand-sewn production is simultaneously an act of aggression, catharsis, and remembrance of surgeries, illnesses and my role as a caregiver.

n/a