LUCIA FABIO and ROBERT ANDREW MUELLER
This is Lucia’s and Robert's first collaborative project together and they hope to continue working together. Lucia Fabio is the director of mini dutch gallery, another apartment gallery in Logan Square. Fabio graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 earning a BFA with an emphasis in Sculpture and Painting and Drawing. She has exhibited in an array of venues including the short-run Kunsthalle Chicago "Dollar Store", and Aferro Gallery in New Jersey. Robert Andrew Muller works in wood and metal, and incorporates movement with pneumatics and electronics. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 earning a BFA with an emphasis in art and technologies studies and sculpture. They share their Logan Square apartment with their two pet rabbits: Fujoe and Patina.
STATEMENT: Mattress bunny started out as light-hearted collaborative project — one to reuse a common material left in alleys and one to combine our art making process. Using a rabbit as imagery, commonly used in Fabio's work, and sculpture, more up Mueller's alley, mattress bunny became a symbol of both disgust and delight. Mattresses are objects we use everyday- we are born on them, live on them, make love on them, and eventually die on them. They are used more than any other object in our lives, and yet, when they are discarded, they become foul and disgusting. The loathed object is then transformed into a large and playful rabbit, and a rabbit is always familiar and inviting. It is a symbol of childhood, a talisman of fertility and a kitsch icon.
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