Annie Marie Novotny

BFA, 2004, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Apprenticeship, Gary Graham, NY (2004). Designer/Owner: Frei Designs, Chicago; Frei Designs Flagship Boutique, Chicago; Workshop, Chicago.

SAIC is a hotbed of creativity—an ever-evolving organic conversation about making and meaning. I feel extremely lucky to find constant inspiration in my students and colleagues alike.

Although I am adept at creating wearable high-end fashion, my main objective is to explore the intersection where fashion and performance meet. In the case of my own work, I often use my background in design as a tool to approach stylized installation and performance work in order to facilitate a dialogue between cloth and flesh. Sometimes, my fashion aesthetics seep out into the overall look or texture of a piece, sometimes it becomes much more about the fabric as a medium, and the body as a palate. The work that I make revolves around mythology versus reality, the body as metaphor, and an exploration of the terrain of the post-modern woman. Motion, intention, gesture, and velocity is the breath of life for the second skins I am looking to achieve. Working mostly in collaboration with artists that use a variety of elements of dance and performance, I enjoy surrounding myself with the collective conversation about where the body and body extension boundaries lie.

My desire is to record my experiences as a woman, an artist, a mother, and a collaborator. I am always finding inspiration in the political and the mundane—trying to meld the current conversations around bodies in general, and my own.