Featured Artist | Lisa Roggenbuck

Lisa Roggenbuck
Boise, ID
lisaroggenbuck.com
@lisaroggenbuck

Lisa Roggenbuck is an Idaho based painter, filmmaker, performance artist, and educator. She was born in Boise, Idaho, where she grew up and received her MFA in 2020 from Boise State University.

Roggenbuck began her career as a tattoo artist in 2001, which ignited her interest in how bodies are influenced by social ideas and how one asserts their identity within those constructs. After 5 years in the body modification industry, she retired and worked as a stripper for the next 13 years—an experience that would later inform her current work as an artist.

Roggenbuck’s art deals with the disconnection women can experience to their bodies by complying with standards of beauty and acceptability that are imposed upon them in western culture. These standards are determined by the dominant culture and problematize bodies that don’t satisfy these standards. This failure to satisfy these standards are then remedied with modifications to the body. These modifications come in the form of consumer products that require time as well as money to execute.

Roggenbuck references the historical nude, female sexuality, and bodily objectification. Color is used as a strategy to address gender and the privilege given to a caucasian appearance. Patterns that appear in the work point to the labor required in presenting one’s appearance, and the removal of individuality in western beauty standards.

In the past 5 years, Roggenbuck’s work has won 7 awards, including the Distinguished Thesis & Project Award for the Creative, Visual, & Performing Arts, and the Presidential Scholar in the Performing & Visual Arts. She currently teaches painting & drawing as an adjunct professor of visual art at Boise State University.