Thick-skinned cuts both ways. It’s the build-up of imperviousness to life’s abrasions over time and lived experience, but it’s also a form of concealment. Without these protections, the human condition would be unbearable. Lynn Basa, Christine Forni, and Bobbi Meier each have their way of approaching material as a metaphor for this survival membrane between the external world and themselves.

Lynn Basa’s roots are in clay, so it’s not surprising that she was drawn to encaustic, a medium that requires fire as a catalyst and lends itself to layering, carving, melting, and other earthy treatments. Her process acts out the personal. She scrapes the faces off of paintings that took days to build up, not only to reveal the memory of what happened beneath but as an action of dissatisfaction with what she had accomplished. Alternately revealing and concealing, she is always searching.

In Christine Forni’s installation, Fragments, made of porcelain, paint skins, and minerals, attached to glass panels, her installation is an archive of unused and discarded elements from other more meticulously crafted bodies of work. Salvaged and mounted together like specimens, they form a “beautiful, but broken” material memory of where she was and what she was doing at a point in time. Unlike precious specimens, these are not preserved under glass, but placed vulnerably on the surface, their fragility on display. Tellingly, Forni embraces the possibility of breakage in her work, stating she’ll just put the work back together differently and learn something new in the process. The glass layers in her sculptures invite close observation with the appearance of strength intertwined with vulnerability.

A first look at Bobbi Meier’s sensuous sculptures often elicits an amused reaction from viewers, but underneath the seemingly lighthearted facades are dark hints of the tragedy and trauma experienced by so many women. She thinks of her awkwardly sensuous and weirdly humorous installations as “emotional repositories for life situations which cannot be changed.” Meier aggressively manipulates delicate materials. Fiber is bound and contorted, disassembled stuffed toys become provocative bits of fur, things that should be soft are hard, and decorative shapes vaguely resemble creases and folds of the body. A dichotomy of seduction and revulsion exists, where fragments of thoughts and materials are re-constructed to become assemblages of grotesque beauty.

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Tags: Bobbi Meier, Chicago, Christine Forni, Epiphany Center for the Arts, Lynn Basa, near west side, THICK-SKINNED