Bobby Allen:
My name is Bobby, and I consider myself a multimedia artist specializing in 3-D mediums and things that kind of look at natural processes, or images from nature, a lot of repurposed stuff, things like that. Within the museum, I consider myself more of a kind of craft or a generalist sort of artist—just like, I wear a lot of different hats.

So I see what appears to be a tire that's been bisected cut right in half, basically, and folded in on itself. The lining of the tire seems to be made of some soft material, or something that's maybe kind of plastery and white. And then over the top of that looks to be some sort of linen with the floral pattern. The florals seem to be sort of just primary color–only flowers. And then where the tire—I don't even know—the opening of the tire there's—there's fencing—the fencing seems to be a bit sharp, in contrast with what's on the inside of the tire.

The juxtaposition of your soft interior, but there's like a—there's like a fence on the outside and the fence is less inviting than the inside, you know, and then it being made of car tire, which are, to me, notoriously toxic—like you can't, you can't actually use the car tire to garden I found out recently, because the materials seep from the tire into the soil. So you kind of have—you took this thing that's a petroleum object, lined it with something soft and something nice, and then created this fencing on the outside, which is also kind of cautionary. In a way, you can kind of see it being representative of an internal—someone's internal world, right? Someone's internal frame of mind. Maybe there's a little bit of “I want you to know me, but I kind of also want you to be cautious.” Maybe that's just my take.

So I started using textiles over COVID. It became, it became sort of the thing to do. . . using fibers. For one, my girlfriend at the time was a costumer for the local theater in Rochester. So she was sewing. She was always kind of like making different accessories and things like that. So there was that influence. And then there was also kind of like the. . . trying to find something cozy, trying to find something comforting to do.

I love speculative fiction, anything that kind of creates, builds up its own world. Anything where it kind of like bends the rules of how we know the world, and in my own stuff, I like to do the same, in a way, kind of create my own little environment, right? Where I kind of just follow my own rules of, like “What is there?” And you know how that little environment works.