ARTIST STATEMENT
My work reflects my own views toward a personal multiplicity of women hoods: embracing, rejecting, and satirizing preconceived notions of femininity. This is done with an emphasis on fine craftsmanship as well as the use of masculine materials and modes of making based on the sculpture of the early avant-garde—rejecting their narrow view on female capability and false guise of evolved thinking. In this sense, labor and skill are a means by which to emasculate patriarchal notions of competency and excellence. This comes together in an autobiographical body of works through a lens which is fixated on humor and a fascination with the absurd.
All of these visual comedies situate themselves on a spectrum of dry humor which ranges between the understated and that which is sincerely slapstick. Sometimes I holster my tongue in my cheek, other times I shove it out at you. Topics such as religion, desire, home, language, labor, identity, and the art historical are treated with the kind of care that occurs at the intersection of the cavalier and the tender—and the points in between. The crux of the work is radical vulnerability bred through compulsive honesty. Using a combination of mold making and casting, metalworking, woodworking, writing, and various fibers techniques, I create sculptural self portraiture in the form of anthropomorphized objects and narrative structures.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Olivia Jobbe is a visual artist living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Sculpturally and performatively, Jobbe creates an autobiographical body of works through a lens which is fixated on humor, a personal multiplicity of femininities, and radical vulnerability bred through compulsive truth telling. Jobbe is currently a BFA undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an awardee of the college’s Presidential Merit Scholarship. She has exhibited at the Riverside Art Center, Hawthorne Contemporary, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s New Outstanding Artist Award, the Robert A. & Dorothy W. Rocke Scholarship, and a South Shore Arts Regional Arts Council Youth Arts Award. Jobbe is the co-founder of the artist-run roving gallery, Probe, which was established in May 2023.
© Olivia Jobbe