Lisa Rybovich Crallé

Lisa Rybovich Crallé is an interdisciplinary artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her research focuses on corporeality and embodied experience. Spanning drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance, her practice seeks to bring the viewer’s awareness to their own physical presence. Crallé’s recent relief sculptures take literal the maxim ‘your body is a temple’ to explore the possibilities of anthropomorphized architecture.

Drawing inspiration from brutalist playground design as well as carved moldings, columns, railings, and other architectural details, her work looks at the built environment’s ability to affect the body, as spaces of shelter, comfort, support, intimidation, domination, or constraint. By pointing to the relationship between the repeated curves of a building’s baseboard, for instance, and the soft folds of skin, Crallé brings a sense of playfulness and consideration to the places we inhabit — inside our bodies, and in the world. The subtle humor present in her work is enriched and belied by the slow, laborious processes that she often employs such as hand-sewing, weaving, wrapping, and layering materials.

Crallé’s work has been presented at Cornell University, the Manetti Shrem Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Berkeley Art Museum, Syracuse University, Mills College, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Land and Sea, and Field Projects. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Ox-Bow (MI), Arteles (Finland), and the Bubec Sculpture Studio (Czech Republic). In addition to her studio practice, Lisa teaches at Berkeley City College and co-organizes Heavy Breathing, a series of experimental, artist-led seminars combining physical movement with group discussion to explore the idea of “critical somatics” — thinking with and as bodies.

www.lisarcralle.com