AINT—BAD
AIMÉE BEAUBIEN
Published on December 5, 2018
by Kayla Story
Aimée Beaubien lives and works in Chicago, IL. Her photo-based collages, sculptures and installations explore collapses in time, space, and place, while engaging the complexities of visual perception. Beaubien experiments with perceptual shifts between the depicted and the touchable. Solo and two-person exhibitions include oqbo galerie, Berlin Germany; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI; BOX 13 Artspace, Houston, TX; Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL; and Demo Projects, Springfield, IL. Group exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; UCRC Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; Art Exhibition Link Castello di S. Severa, Italy; Bikini Berlin, Berlin, Germany; and Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, Art on Paper, and Art Papers. Beaubien is Assistant Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I embrace the documentary capacity of the camera, recording what I encounter. Since its origin, photography has been used to capture, preserve, and accumulate information: arresting fleeting phenomena as visual records. My approach to photography is iterative, recombinant, and gestural. I ask questions that re-imagine photography. I explore generative and cumulative strategies of making, fascinated by the alterations of format, context, scale, experience and site.
Photographic paper is my sculptural material. Through it, I experiment with perceptual shifts between the depicted and the touchable. My images become printed photographs, then sculptural forms. Cutting, weaving and reassembling, I transform my photographs into complex sculptural interventions that disrupt the rectilinear format and traditional conventions of photographic display. These collage-based sculptures and installations are interative, growing and altering within new architectural contexts.
My recent work reflects on the garden and the photograph as parallels: aesthetic spaces where the impulse to collect confronts ephemerality, and taxonomic order meets unpredictable elements. In my garden installations, cut forms interweave, encircle, and hang; trail in ribbon-like shreds; and become wild ornamental outgrowths mapping associations between the garden, the ephemeral, and the photographic.
I am captivated by many different types of collections, from the significant objects curated and presented by museums to idiosyncratic displays in homes. My photographs are often made in institutional exhibits of art and artifacts, in quirky home museums, in urban plant conservatories, and in my domestic space. I often allow everyday objects from my domestic space to become integrated into the structure of my sculptures and installations. I am fascinated by the translational spaces between image and material. Surrounded by suspended, propped, and perched objects, I reflect on our entanglements with the objects and images we collect.
To view more of Aimée Beaubien’s work please visit their website.
Curator's Choice, Issue No.13 Top 100
Details :
8.25″x10.75″, 256 pages,
Perfect Bound
Edition Size 1500
ISBN : 978-1-944005-18-4
Printed in the Netherlands
Introduction by : The Editors
Guest Curators and Interviews by :
Alan Rothschild
Amy Elkins
Anna Skillman
Heavy Collective
Jennifer Murray
Kris Graves
Michael Itkoff
Paloma Shutes
Paul Kopeikin
Rachel Reese
Robert Lyons
Small Talk Collective
Susan Laney
Zemie Barr
PICKUP YOUR COPY TODAY!
Filed under Article, Curator's Choice, Issue No.13 Top 100
Tagged aimeebeaubien, chicagoartist, Issue No.13,photoinstallation, photoweaving