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Unprecedented Growth: A Review of “Through the Hothouse” by Aimée Beaubien at HPAC
If you spent an hour simply walking back and forth through the second-floor hallway in the Hyde Park Art Center that “Through the Hothouse” occupies, you might find something new every time you passed through Aimée Beaubien’s ninety-two-foot-long immersive installation. ““Through the Hothouse” briefly transports us through a hypersaturated plastic jungle where paracord vines hang from the ceiling and fabrics depicting otherworldly plants stretch around jumbled electrical cords towards multicolored lights. Beaubien’s hallway is a gauntlet of sensory overload interjecting itself between point “A” and point “B”—an unexpected journey squeezed into the gaps of a straight-line path.
The imagery of the “Hothouse” is colorful and dynamic, but it is also very artificial. There are real leaves hidden in the labyrinthine “Hothouse,” but it requires careful observation to notice them. Beaubien’s whimsical installation also functions as an anxious reminder of rising global temperatures and ecological devastation yet to come. The “Hothouse” feels either like a mystical forest illustrated with crayons and an overactive imagination or a synthetic hellscape carefully crafted from the remains of a world embalmed in plastic.
As I walked through the hallway a second time, a dried oak leaf encased in the scrawled lines of a plastic enclosure caught my attention amidst the tangles of cabling surrounding it. Beaubien has created several installations exploring the “Hothouse” since 2015; for this most recent version, she used a 3D printing pen to draw many of the shapes populating her hallway. Further down the path, my eyes were drawn to a different suspended leaf that upon closer inspection revealed itself to be a paper cutout. The vibrant lighting in Beaubien’s hallway is disorienting to the point that it conceals more than it reveals, but it also helps certain details stand out within the visual cacophony of the “Hothouse.” Resting on the floor near one end of the exhibition is a book lit by a cyan floodlight, titled “Garden Flowers in Color,” opened to a page with information on petunias. The artificial environment of the “Hothouse” makes the book’s cheery indexical language feel like a description of an extinct species.
Beaubien’s layered approach to this exhibition extends the practice of landscape photography from imagery to substance. “Through the Hothouse” also wrestles with the fallibility of descriptions as a stand-in for the real world: One needn’t stop and smell the printed petunias along the way.
'Aimée Beaubien: Into the Hothouse' Art Exhibition at GMU
This is a conversation between Associate Curator, Jeffrey Kenney, and Artist Aimée Beaubien about the exhibition on view August 21 - November 10, 2023 at the Gillespie Gallery of Art on GMU's Fairfax, VA Campus.
Into the Hothouse invites viewers to contemplate the intricate connections between photographic images, the natural world, and the complexities of visual representation through an immersive site-specific installation. Suspended throughout the 2,000 square foot gallery space, the exhibition is a category-defying constellation of dozens of gathered, printed, and hand-made works that model, depict, or present botanical and environmental subject matter including intricately manipulated photographic materials and objects representing leaves, and flowers, vine and web-like textile configurations, and bio-plastic encased dried botanical specimens. Natural forms, technological interventions, and laborious craft techniques abound. The installation is a purposely hybrid environment offering a range of interpretations. Modeling our mixed-up relationship to the natural world, Beaubien’s work cultivates both the pleasure of exploring an enchanted garden while its artificiality gestures toward the tension and confusion at the center of our distorted relationship with the ecological world.
AIMÉE BEAUBIEN: THROUGH THE HOTHOUSE
HYDE PARK ART CENTER | March 2 – June 2, 2024
Aimée Beaubien, the internationally exhibited artist who has established herself as an educator and peer in the Chicago art community, showcases her innovative techniques in Through the Hothouse. The installation transforms a 92-foot-long hallway into a green corridor by integrating elements such as plant matter, weaving, photographs, and 3D drawings. These elements symbolize the intricate interplay between ecological, social, and cultural dimensions within the vibrant creative community of the Art Center.
Since 2015, Beaubien has been creating a series of site-specific installations loosely centered on the concept of a hothouse—a deliberately hybrid environment designed to nurture rapid development. Expanding on the series, this exhibition will amaze audiences with Beaubien’s debut innovative technique of drawing on recently cut plant material (like tulips, sunflowers, and branches) with a 3D pen using PLA bioplastic filament. The result is a floating landscape of voluminous, brightly colored sculptures that preserve nature in an uncanny manner. The installation will immerse viewers in a rare garden of strange and enticing forms that remind us of the wonder typically only found outdoors.
“Photographs and plants are intricately interwoven throughout the fabric of my work. I map connections between contemporary life and the fragmented state of nature. In a world where nature is being increasingly depleted, I utilize the photographic medium’s capacity for infinite reproduction to envision a boundless propagation of plant life.” – Aimée Beaubien
Beaubien’s work challenges common assumptions about landscape and raises important questions about preservation, conservation, and care for green space within the built environment.
Aimée Beaubien: Into the Hothouse
Aimée Beaubien: INTO THE HOTHOUSE
GILLESPIE GALLERY OF ART, August 21 - November 10, 2023
Curated by Jeffrey Kenney
Into the Hothouse invites viewers to contemplate the intricate connections between photographic images, the natural world, and the complexities of visual representation through an immersive site-specific installation.
Suspended throughout the 2,000 square foot gallery space, the exhibition is a category-defying constellation of dozens of gathered, printed, and hand-made works that model, depict, or present botanical and environmental subject matter including intricately manipulated photographic materials and objects representing leaves, and flowers, vine and web-like textile configurations, and bio-plastic encased dried botanical specimens. Natural forms, technological interventions, and laborious craft techniques abound. The installation is a purposely hybrid environment offering a range of interpretations. Modeling our mixed-up relationship to the natural world, Beaubien’s work cultivates both the pleasure of exploring an enchanted garden while its artificiality gestures toward the tension and confusion at the center of our distorted relationship with the ecological world.
Experimentation and Preservation
Experimentation lies at the heart of Beaubien's artistic practice. She embraces the malleability of photographic images, pushing the boundaries of the medium by transforming them into sculptural forms. Traditional craft textile techniques such as weaving, knotting, and knitting figure into her approach to form. Through cutting, reassembling, and weaving photographs together, she challenges conventional notions of foreground, middle-ground, and background, blurring the distinctions between representation and abstraction, image and material. This meticulous process of translation, revision and reassembly, transcends the confines of traditional representation and fosters a network of impressions that foreground relations between reality and artifice, viewer and environment, and a sense of interconnectedness between the natural and anthropocentric.
The depiction of time and memory emerge as recurrent themes within Beaubien's work. Present in the installation are nods to preservation and archiving implicit in the apparatuses of the hothouse, herbarium, and photographic medium. Among the many diverse photographic styles and printed surfaces, Beaubien often concentrates her camera and collecting instincts on botanical subjects and landscape imagery captured in a casual style emphasizing her personal and subjective view. Snapshots proliferate throughout the exhibit, distilling the momentary and emphasizing the chance encounter.
The light touch of the snapshot and the photographic impulse to capture and retain extend to many of the sculptural flourishes in the exhibit. One of Beaubien’s preferred sculptural methods is to encase botanical specimens such as flowers, leaves and branches in a biodegradable PLA plastic filament, extruded through a 3d pen. Using this device and a vibrant range of hues, the artist meticulously “draws” onto cuttings from her garden and organic material found in her surroundings. The results can vary from dense candy colored fossil-like branch forms or allium plants embedded in neon tracery that recalls the mathematically faceted forms of mid-century visionaries like Buckminster Fuller or Naum Gabo. This method also conjures the intricate and delicate lacelike structures found in nature such as silkworm cocoons and spiderwebs. Adding to the strange fascination of these sculptural interventions, extruding thin plastic webs on and over the botanical specimens replicates and preserves the plant’s likeness in three dimensions, while the original withers, dries, and is entombed inside. What remains are, on the surface, whimsical pop-art infused celebrations of the floral and arboreal that close inspection reveal to be poignant memento mori. An exuberant exterior enclosing a wilted core.
Gatherings: Archive, Sequence, Collage
Beaubien employs methods of arrangement in her sculptural tableaux that are intrinsic to her practice as a maker of artist books; examples of her books are included in the exhibit. In making her photo-based original books, primary attention is given to the sequencing of images and how they unfold as an experience over time. She often deploys the improvisational methods of collage using the potential friction or coherence between similar or contrasting subjects to produce abstract narrative-like momentum or rhythmic pulses. She uses a similar logic of contrast and accretion in her sculptural and architecturally contingent arrangements in the space of the gallery. Rather than a linear movement through the pages of a book, the exhibit design allows for multiple pathways and encounters. Delicate moments of careful examination are brought into orbit with dense and sometimes chaotic compounds of image and form in which the viewer and space begin to network together. Nodes cluster and expand. Zoom, pan, focus, blur. Thickets give way to clearings, tendrils to bouquets. The body passes through, around, and between. Attention gathers, then dissipates, then gathers anew.
Beaubien’s artist book, With Inger (2018), in which she studied, appropriated, and merged her personal explorations of Iceland with the personal photographic archive from the 1970’s of an obscure Icelandic photographer named Inger Helene Boasson, is presented here as a 90 ft. long scroll-like panorama, positioning the book pages end to end. In this configuration the book pages suggest a horizon line for the rest of the installation, as well evoking a timeline, or film strip. With Inger is a kind of collaborative auto-biography and epistolary essay in images, representing the two photographers’ lives through their research activities, replete with contact sheets, snapshots and practiced attempts at creating photographic art. The works from Inger’s archive, that Beaubien remixes, are a diverse collection of her personal subjective vision and responses to her local environment, friends and loved ones, and travels through the Icelandic landscape. This subjective and free ranging approach of Inger’s practice resonated with Beaubien, whose photographic work often starts in her backyard garden but may extend to other geographies she visits for artist residencies and exhibitions. The book interweaves these two distinctly individual photographers, Aimée and Inger, though decades and continents separated. Poetically mirroring one another, their lives echo through each other, despite the distance. The resulting photo montage is a reminder of the narrative consistency that underpins human subjectivity.
Sharing wall space and overlapping sections of With Inger are eleven gilt framed 19th century gouache paintings from the Neapolitan School featuring views of Mount Vesuvius. Borrowing this historical collection of paintings from George Mason University's permanent collection and including them in the installation, Beaubien connects these pre-photographic souvenir paintings from the so-called Grand Tour to her artist residency experience in Iceland. Iceland was formed in part by volcanic activity and continues to have frequent eruptions. While on her Icelandic residency Beaubien was fascinated by the amount of volcanic imagery that she encountered in her explorations. She documents many of these illustrations in a scroll-like photograph suspended nearby in the installation.
Both the borrowed paintings and With Inger can be seen as distinct examples of a type of travelog while their display anchors this part of the exhibit in a manner recalling a museum, mixing examples across time, culture, and geography into a set of key traits. Beaubien breaks with the conventional display by overlapping images and further fragmenting potential readings by forgoing didactic information. Through these distancing techniques, Beaubien allows for a free association of imagery while throwing into relief the conventions we have come to expect from such a display.
An Enclosed World
Throughout Into the Hothouse, like many of Beaubien’s previous installations, she consciously pushes against the expectations of standard art exhibition experience. Her go-to method is to have her photos and objects suspended in space, connected by a paracord material, attached at various points throughout the gallery ceiling fixtures. This program of display mimics vines, webs and other natural phenomena while inverting the viewer’s usual relationship to sculptural objects. Rather than worrying about objects being toppled from a pedestal or keeping the viewer an appropriate distance from them, the suspension system of her sculptural and photographic tableaux allows and encourages items to move and react to light touch or being casually bumped. With Into the Hothouse, Beaubien actively courts audience interaction further by clustering a group of bio-plastic coated branch forms, photos and a dense thicket of dangling ends of paracord in the entrance of the exhibit. To enter the show, one must push through and brush up against parts of the art work. By opening up the tactile aspects of the space, releasing the viewer from the pressures of conforming to familar constraints that often undergird the gallery experience, Beaubien’s installation intentionally attempts to put viewers at ease. This freedom opens the potential of the space as a social site, inviting interaction with the artworks and with each other.
As a whole the installation has a shape and dynamic that evokes various forms of biological systems such as neural pathways, fungal networks, and rhizomatic plant growth. In this way, Beaubien’s use of highly saturated colored lighting not only adds a vivid theatricality and phantasmagorical quality to the environment, but also draws parallels to scientific imaging techniques that use advanced technological devices, such as MRI, scanning electron microscopy, or deep space telescopes. In these imaging technologies, color is used as an artificial additive or enhancement, in order to highlight and reveal properties otherwise invisible through standard observation. Adding an additional layer of technological intervention, Beaubien incorporates motors to produce subtle movements, like a mechanical wind, among some of her hanging elements. The movements are subtle, trembling and somewhat herky-jerky. The metronome-like whir of these motors reverberates through the installation, and uncannily suggest the sounds of printing apparatus or hospital room systems, projecting a sense that the exhibit is either in continual production mode or on a means of mechanically assisted life support.
The hothouse itself is a kind of technology developed as a means of life support. It is a structure designed to cultivate and protect delicate plants in a controlled environment, fostering their growth and preservation. The development of hothouses shares some historical colonial ties with the photographic medium, particularly concerning botanical collections. During the colonial era, the advent of photography coincided with the rapid expansion of botanical explorations and expeditions worldwide. As European powers sought to expand their empires, botanical collections became essential for documenting and categorizing newly discovered plant species from far-flung territories. Photography emerged as a valuable tool to preserve botanical specimens and accurately depict diverse flora from distant lands. The ability to capture high-quality images allowed botanists and explorers to share their findings with scientific communities and the general public, shaping a collective understanding of the natural world beyond colonial borders.
Metaphorically, a hothouse also connotes an environment of rapid accumulation, acceleration, or saturation. Photography and digital communication networks have now surpassed all other technologies in conditioning our understanding of the other species and the distinct geographic regions that compose the earth. Tying the photographic impulse to historical programs of science and economics has enhanced the endless drive to understand, dissect, transform, and extract information from the tangled and interdependent contours of life. As a result, we have conscribed much of our appreciation of “the natural world” to image, text, and resource.
Despite the hyper stimulating quantity of competing images, colors, and tangles of form, Beaubien’s exhibition exudes a quiet magic and generosity of spirit. The artist is a world builder. Her environments project a sense of wonder through an overflow of intentionality and a condensing of idiosyncratic creative impulses. On display are over ten years of her creative output. This retrospective of sorts presents a fascinating view of her artistic project as it continues to evolve. Into the Hothouse, is by equal turns entertaining, experimental, and playful. It is also seriously engaged in a provocative inquiry, boldly embodying the fraught dynamics between nature and artifice in our media-saturated age.
Faculty Sabbatical Triennial Exhibition at SAIC galleries
Faculty Sabbatical Triennial Exhibition Opens at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
This fall, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) will present the SAIC Faculty Sabbatical Triennial exhibition, featuring a wide range of work across multiple disciplines created by nearly 40 faculty who have completed a sabbatical or other paid leave over the past three academic years. Gallery-based presentations, lectures and events, and a dedicated website represent the research and practices of these SAIC faculty members.
“Sabbaticals are often a time for inquiry, experimentation, and production to help faculty sustain their instructional and professional practices,” said Staci Boris, director of exhibitions and curator of the SAIC Faculty Sabbatical Triennial exhibition. “Many of the sabbaticals were impacted by the pandemic, yet the work produced during this time is exceptionally inspiring as faculty embraced the uncertainty, looked to the familiar, and explored new ways of making.”
The Triennial, which opens August 31 at SAIC Galleries, and related programs celebrate the unrelenting creativity and resilience of SAIC’s renowned faculty. The exhibition includes several new works that have never been on view, including a painting from Candida Alvarez that will be making its Chicago debut. Participating faculty include Candida Alvarez, Aimée Beaubien, jonCates, Nic Collins, Romi Crawford, Kate Dumbleton, Stephen Farrell, Elizabeth Freeland, Pablo Garcia, Maria Gaspar, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Anne Harris, Claudia Hart, Myungah Hyon, Mark Jeffery, Bruce Jenkins, Linda Keane, Lora Lode, Anke Loh, Lou Mallozzi, Ruth Margraff, William J. O’Brien, Mary Patten, Claire Pentecost, Dushko Petrovich, Frank Piatek, Dan Price, Eia Radosavljevic, Melissa Raman Molitor, David Raskin, Scott Reeder, Katrin Schnabl, Jim Trainor, Lan Tuazon, Oli Watt, Bess Williamson, Beth Wright, and Andrew S. Yang.
This 2022 edition of the Triennial marks the first in a newly conceived series dedicated to faculty work, which will occur every three years at SAIC Galleries as the featured exhibition of the fall semester. The 2022 SAIC Faculty Sabbatical Triennial is organized by Staci Boris, director of exhibitions, and Graduate Curatorial Assistants Clayton Kennedy (Dual MA 2023) and Christine Magill (Dual MA 2023).
The 2022 Paula Riff Award
The 2022 Winner is Aimee Beaubien
We’re thrilled to present the 2022 Paula Riff Award Winner! We received hundreds of submissions for this year’s competition from photographers across the country and around the world. Juror Aline Smithson had quite a challenge selecting a single artist. The Center for Photographic Art and Lenscratch are pleased to announce that Aimee Beaubien is this year’s winner!
Juror’s Statement
Thank you to Ann Jastrab and the Center of Photographic Arts for aligning with Lenscratch to offer the annual Paula Riff Award. This award is very personal to me. Paula started her journey into alternative processes in my classes and I had a ringside seat into her trajectory and legacy as a unique photographic artist.
It was a complete pleasure to spend time with all the work submitted, each truly worthy of recognition. I was thrilled to see work I was familiar with, but also have so many new artists and projects to consider.
Ultimately, I selected Aimee Beaubien to receive the 2022 Paula Riff Award. Beaubien’s use of color, her fearlessness in challenging what we think of as a photograph, and her incredible sense of play were qualities that inspired my decision. And many folks don’t know that Paula, towards the end of her life, was working on constructions that were inspired by mobiles and was taking her work off the wall and into a 3-D space. I think she would be thrilled to know that this award is going to a fellow innovator.
Congratulations to Aimee Beaubien, and also many thanks to all who submitted.
About Aimee
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal in cut-up collages, artists’ books and immersive installations. A photographed plant, interlaced vine, woven topography merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature. Beaubien’s work has been included in national and international exhibitions including SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA; Demo Projects, Springfield, IL; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997. Aimee’s website. >
Artist Statement
I document my own personal entanglements with domestic spaces, institutions, archives and narratives suggested by things and associative histories. I photograph in my tiny Chicago garden, my mother’s lush Florida garden and gardens in between. I translate my responses into an array of different representations of size and push color to its limits, cutting my printed notations apart to completely reorganize photographic material and experience.
My work draws from an environment of hyperstimulation and interruption; comparing the disjointed experience of attention and distraction to the sharp recontextualization of collage. These webs of connections are rewoven into vibrant configurations, tethered within installations and unfolding in artists’ books. Expanded ranges of time are illuminated in environments folding around and stretching into the peripheries of visual and architectural space.
The imaginative expanse of the home, museum and garden holds me. In it, lines blur between public and private, institutional and domestic, labor and leisure, propagation and contemplation. With my camera, I move through different types of collections reflecting on our attachments to objects, focusing on the complex tethers to the things that we collect. I began to think more deeply about how the idiosyncratic nature of our personal collections extends into the compositions of the gardens we construct.
Wild, fast growing vines slink through the yard and climb around our house. Inside my home studio, plants mingle with huge tangles of cut and woven photographs that dangle down from the ceiling. I photograph the ever-changing conditions in my studio as plants dry and projects grow. From my photographs I create ephemeral paper structures that accommodate, attach to, climb, trail, cling, spread, creep and rearrange within each new exhibition environment: loudly, brightly.
The spliced open and folded, the domestic and the collected, the intersecting and multidirectional structure: these are the substance of my photographic cut-ups that take form in artists’ books, collages and installations. My works are vivid yet fragile assertions of personal and art historical trajectories at the margins of the archive.
About Paula Riff
Paula Riff was a Los Angeles based artist known for creating one of a kind camera-less photographic works on paper that embrace bold colors, form and design. She combined the historical processes of cyanotype and gum bichromate allowing her a physical and intimate relationship with the materials that she used to push the boundaries of the medium while considering themes of abstraction and the natural world.
Her work was selected for the Critical Mass Top 50 Award in 2018 and 2019, and she was a 2018 finalist for the Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women in the Alternative Process Category. Paula also received the Museum Purchase Award at the Medium Photo Festival in 2019. Her work has appeared in numerous museums, galleries, publications, and exhibitions throughout the U.S and internationally, and is also held in private collections.
The Newport Daily News
Arts
Newport Art Museum's artist residency returns with nationally recognized artist
Published 12:46p.m. ET June 10, 2022
For over two centuries, Newport has attracted influential artists, artisans, writers, architects and designers who were inspired by the natural beauty of this oceanfront community. The Newport Art Museum artist residency, AiR/Newport, is designed to encourage the creative, intellectual and personal growth of emerging and established visual artists and designers by giving them the time, space, and solitude needed to create, apart from the daily demands of production and deadline. Today’s permanent collections of Rhode Island’s many museums, cultural organizations and historic homes offer a rich repository of artifacts and archives for AiR/Newport resident artists to explore.
After a two-year postponement due to the global health pandemic, the Newport Art Museum has welcomed artist Aimée Beaubien for the month of June 2022.
Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago, whose work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. Her cut-up photographic collages, installations and artist books explore networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal: a photographed plant, interlaced vine, woven topography merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature. Beaubien is an associate professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, where she has taught since 1997.
The Newport Art Museum is committed to cultivating a culture of inclusion and recognizes the importance of honoring, celebrating and sharing our individual differences and life experiences. The Museum believes in the idea that viewing our world from another’s perspective helps promote connection and civic engagement. On Wednesday, June 29 at 5 p.m., the Museum will present an Artist Talk with Aimée Beaubien when guests can hear directly from Aimée and see what was created during her residency in the museum’s Griswold House. More information and registration is available at newportartmuseum.org.
48hills
48hills Independent San Francisco news & culture
Enter Aimée Beaubien's delightfully messy, exuberant 'Matter in the Hothouse'
ARTS + CULTUREARTCULTUREART REVIEW
At SF Camerawork, the artist weaves and transforms her photographs into an immersive, otherworldly garden
JULY 6, 2022
In its Minnesota Street Project Gallery Space, SF Camerwork presents Chicago-based Aimée Beaubien’s Matter in the Hothouse (through Sat/9), the recipient of the 2020 Exhibition Award, delayed for two years because of the pandemic. Beaubien’s ambitious and phantasmagoric mixed-media installation is yet another example of the ways in which SF Camerawork has championed experimental photographic work that extends the discipline beyond formal framed prints. Beaubien’s delightfully messy and exuberant installation uses the artificiality and surreal atmosphere of the greenhouse to explore the intersection of nature and culture.
At the heart of Beaubien’s installation, the artist presents many photographs of lush green leaves, printed on paper and satin. As plants are cut for harvest, trimmed for maintenance, or shaped as topiary, Beaubien cuts her photographs. In removing the backgrounds, creating voids of negative space, or slicing the images into strips that she weaves and knots, the artist transforms her photographs beyond the flat rectangle and into dimensional and shaped objects. In the images that are woven together, like textiles or palm frond mats, Beaubien creates moire patterns that optically bulge and stretch, suggesting the process of hybridization, disintegration, or emergence.
As Beaubien has transformed her photographs into sculptural objects, she extends these spatial dynamics to densely fill the entire gallery to create an immersive environment. From floor to ceiling, hanging clusters of images, flowers, and ropes overtake the gallery. Amidst the precariously hung paper and fabric tendrils, viewers must negotiate our own bodies as we navigate the space, possibly an ecological reminder that we humans should tread carefully.
With the prints, ropes, thermoplastics, and colored lighting gels in highly saturated cyans, magentas, and greens, Beaubien renders the “natural” as otherworldly. The clusters of leaves of many different species, like monstera and alocasia, suggest nature’s rich fauna and a hybridity of tropical plant life; in the artificial context of the greenhouse plants from around the world might be growing side-by-side. In addition, scale adds to this sense of wonder with oversized prints of leaves and bulbous accumulations. Beaubien’s strange world highlights how nature is a construct and within the context of a greenhouse, “the natural” is severely altered.
Among the flurry of engaging visual moments within the work, the most interesting are branches and silk flowers cocooned in linear patterns of thermoplastics. Like crude, but intricate line drawings, the brightly colored oozy plastic suggests gigantic spider webs, the decayed remains of leave veins, or flourishes of Victorian ornament.
While Beaubien creates magical moments of visual and material association, the artist may get a little too literal with the inclusion of several botanical books. Placed near lilies and other flowers, the books are opened to reveal pages that offer botanical descriptions. While the information is relevant to the flowers, the relationship between the text and objects could be more unsettling amid the surreal environment. Perhaps had the books been deconstructed or excessive ornamentalized, like the rest of the objects in the installation, they may have contributed to additional formal, narrative, or material poignancy.
Despite my uncertainty about the botanical books, Beaubien’s intriguing installation captures the magic of exploration and the strangeness of the natural world. At every moment in the installation Beaubien creates intriguing formal and material relationships between “the natural” world and the biosphere of the hothouse.
MATTER IN THE HOTHOUSE shows at SF Camerawork through Sat/9. More info here.
JUXTAPOZ
JUXTAPOZ MAGAZINE: Art & Culture
Matter in the Hothouse: Aimée Beaubien's Vibrant, Immersive Installation
SF Camerawork // May 12, 2022 - July 09, 2022
June 01, 2022 | in Photography
Aimée Beaubien’s dynamic installation at SF Camerawork combines cut and woven photographs of plants, plant materials, and mixed media additions hung from the ceiling in strips and waves that the viewer is invited to carefully traverse. Bold leaf shapes and twisting ribbons of photos entwine, cluster and creep. Photographed plants, interlaced vines, and woven topographies merge into fields of color and pattern and back again - expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature.
Beaubien was the winner of SF Camerawork's 2020 Exhibition Award.
Virtual Walkthrough of Matter in the Hothouse
Prospectus for Unfurl, Unfold: the touch of a leaf, the page in a book felt
Unfurl Unfold | Aimée Beaubien
Unfurl Unfold: the touch of a leaf, the page in a book felt
Artist Book
2021
Edition of 25
Produced through the 2021 Editions Program
View the Full Prospectus
spoke the vine
grasping for words
arm-in-arm-in-arm
image-text-designby Aimée Beaubien
Through the tactile pages of Unfurl Unfold: the touch of a leaf, the page in a book felt, Aimée Beaubien visualizes her longstanding draw to books and vines. Mesmerized by vines and their steadfast embrace of all that they encounter, Beaubien has created an artist book in which the reading experience mimics the movements of a growing vine. Gatefolds allow the reader to expand the dimensions of the book while the turning of pages reveal inclusions that feature plant-inspired poetry and clues to the many horticulture-related books visually referenced throughout the book. Imagery in this book include cut-up and woven photographs of plant matter, still lifes featuring books from the Beaubien’s personal library, and documentation of her immersive art installations.
Through combining screenprinting and inkjet printing, the artist was liberated from the expectations of conventional photography. Beaubien dissected her compositions, at times literally peeling layers of a photograph into distinct color fields, and at times rebuilding new fantastical compositions and color palettes. Many textures appear visually in the photographs (architectural elements, plant matter, books, lace, embroidery, etc), and the combination of print methods heightens the sensation of touching the pages. The use of Tyvek paper, inclusions from vintage books, and a woven paracord binding further pushes the tactile playfulness of Unfurl Unfold.
This visceral book has been assembled for aesthetic pleasure as well as to reflect on how gardens and libraries portray time, and examine how plant life, be it immaculately tended or untamed growth, is integrated into all aspects of life.
Book Details:
– 10″ x 23″ artist book that open to up to 10″ x 46″
– Hand-sewn French link stitch binding with paracord that grows into a woven element mimicking interlocking vine structures
– Includes 32 images combining inkjet and screenprint on Tyvek
– Comprised of six folios including two 6-page gatefold concertinas and one 8-page parallel map fold
– The book with its many inserts is housed inside of a 12″ x 18″ inkjet printed and sewn Tyvek enclosure
Image-Text-Design by Aimée Beaubien. Printed in collaboration with Angee Lennard at Spudnik Press Cooperative in Chicago, IL.
Inserts Include:
– Screenprint on a unique illustrated spread from a vintage garden book*
– Ink and artist tape on index from a vintage garden book*
– Four double-sided screenprints pressed between pages
– Patterned protective glassine interleaving
– Colophon with image descriptions flowing across a facsimile of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium.
*screen print on select spreads from Garden Flowers in Color: A Picture Cyclopedia of Flowers by G.A. Stevens, 1939 (“a most unusual Garden book and one that is made possible only by an extremely happy combination of circumstances.”)
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal in cut-up collages, artists’ books and immersive installations. A photographed plant, interlaced vine, woven topography merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature. Beaubien’s work has been included in national and international exhibitions including Demo Projects, Springfield, IL; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997.
This project is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, a state agency.
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY
A Picture-Cyclopedia - Aimée Beaubien
A Picture-Cyclopedia (lily-lavender-windflower-morning glory), 2021
Aimée Beaubien
Photograph, vintage garden books, lily drawings, morning glories, miniature clothespins, paracord, grow light on fabric cord
Randolph display window at Chicago Cultural Center
November 2021 - April 2022
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Her cut-up photographic collages, installations and artist books explore networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal: a photographed plant, interlaced vine, woven topography merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature. Beaubien’s work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997.
http://www.aimeebeaubien.com/
@aimeebeaubien
A Picture-Cyclopedia - Aimée Beaubien
A Picture-Cyclopedia - Aimée Beaubien
Randolph display window at Chicago Cultural Center
November 2021 - April 2022
A Picture-Cyclopedia (lily-lavender-windflower-morning glory), 2021
photographs, vintage garden books, lily drawings, morning glories, miniature clothespins, paracord, grow light on fabric cords
FOCUS ON INSTALLATION: AIMÉE BEAUBIEN By Aline SmithsonApril 5, 2021
©Aimée Beaubien, Hothouse, 2015 cut-up photographs, paracord, mason line, miniature clothespins, grow light on fabric cord dimensions variable (sculpture on right) Rejoining Roger Brown – What’s happening now, 2015 cut-up photographs, miniature clothespins, candlestick, wooden table 59 x 22 x 20 inches Cutting Edges: Beaubien & Liang, The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI
Photography is always in transition and this week, we feature artists who are expanding how we think about and exhibit photographs. Aimée Beaubien is a wonderful example of uniquely using the medium as a way to re-see and experience 2 dimensional images, as she creates immersive, sculptural environments. She states: My own notational flashes exist as photographs and from my prints I create ephemeral paper structures that accommodate, attach, climb, trail, cling, spread, creep and rearrange within each new exhibition environment: loudly, brightly.
Beaubien recently received the inaugural SF Camerawork Exhibition Award for her proposal Matter in the Hothouse. This award recognizes a project proposal featuring exceptional creative photographic work, and will support those efforts with an exhibition grant in the amount of $5,000. She will be opening an exhibition with SF Camerawork in the near future. An interview with the artist follows.
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal in cut-up collages, artists’ books and immersive installations. A photographed plant, interlaced vine, woven topography merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature. Beaubien’s work has been included in national and international exhibitions including Demo Projects, Springfield, IL; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997. IG @aimeebeaubien
©Aimée Beaubien, Garden Flowers in Color, 2020 cut-up photographs, paracord, PLA filament, polymer chains, porcelain chains, miniature clothespins, vintage garden books, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, dried flowers Artists Run Chicago 2.0, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL
The imaginative expanse of the home, museum and garden holds me. In it, lines blur between public and private, institutional and domestic, labor and leisure, propagation and contemplation. Wild, fast growing vines slink through the yard, climb up and around our house. Inside my home studio, plants mingle with huge tangles of cut and woven photographs that dangle down from the ceiling. I photograph the ever-changing conditions in my studio as plants dry and projects grow.
With my camera, I move through different types of collections reflecting on our attachments to objects, focusing on the complex tethers between an artist’s work and the things they collect. I spent one year photographing in the home museum known as the Roger Brown Study Collection, capturing my own impressions of the articles that surrounded this celebrated Chicago painter during his lifetime. Brown’s multilayered assemblages drawn through his domestic spaces felt like collages activated as my body drifted throughout his home. After learning that Roger Brown cultivated fifty different varieties of roses in one of his gardens, I began to think more deeply about how the idiosyncratic nature of our personal collections extends into the compositions of the gardens we construct.
©Aimée Beaubien, Hothouse Picture-Cyclopedia, 2019 cut-up photographs, paracord, polymer chains, porcelain chains, grow lights on fabric cord, miniature clothespins, vintage garden books, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, dried lemons, dried plants dimensions variable New Formations, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL
Archeologists have been unearthing and restoring Emily Dickinson’s garden in an effort to better understand her personal world and source of creativity. Dickinson kept collections of letters addressed to her close at hand to record textual fragments running every which way along the flaps and folds of her envelope poems in flashes of impulse. The spliced open and folded, the domestic and the collected, the intersecting and multidirectional structure: these too are the substance of my photographic cut-ups that take form in artists’ books, collages, sculptures and installations. My own notational flashes exist as photographs and from my prints I create ephemeral paper structures that accommodate, attach, climb, trail, cling, spread, creep and rearrange within each new exhibition environment: loudly, brightly.
Throughout the seasons and over her lifetime, my great-grandmother attentively photographed what grew around her. Extending this fertile lineage, I photograph in my tiny Chicago garden, my mother’s lush Florida garden and the many gardens in-between. I translate my responses into an array of different representations of size and push color to its limits, cutting my printed notations apart to completely reorganize photographic material and experience. The effects of time on the color of my great-grandmother’s snapshots – some screaming in degrees of hot pinks, others soaked in glowing oranges – hover in my imagination as I weave together my own saturated prints.
©Aimée Beaubien, Hothouse Picture-Cyclopedia, 2019 cut-up photographs, paracord, polymer chains, porcelain chains, grow lights on fabric cord, miniature clothespins, vintage garden books, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, dried lemons, dried plants dimensions variable New Formations, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL
My work draws from an environment of hyperstimulation, compulsion and interruption; comparing the disjointed experience of attention and distraction to the sharp recontextualization of collage. I document my own personal entanglements with domestic spaces, institutions, archives and narratives suggested by the life and histories of things. These webs of connections are rewoven into vibrant configurations, tethered within installations that become physical presences moving in and through exhibition spaces. Expanded ranges of time are illuminated in environments folding around and stretching into the peripheries of visual and architectural space. My works are bright yet fragile assertions of personal and art historical trajectories at the margins of the archive. – Aimée Beaubien
©Aimée Beaubien, Tangled Sensations, 2018 cut-up photographs, printed satin, grow lights on fabric cord, hammock chair swings, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, dried lemons, dried plants dimensions variable Truth Claim, Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL
Take us back to the beginning. How did you come to photography and at what point did you begin to intervene as an artist, following a less traditional path?
Making has always been a form of thinking and processing information for me.
“TWO OCTOPUSES GOT MARRIED AND WALKED DOWN THE AISLE ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM IN ARM…” is the very first thing I remember igniting my imagination. The enchanting illustrations are easy to recall, with text crawling all over the page like concrete poetry in this dazzling children’s book by Remy Charlip titled Arm in Arm. Books have been a lifelong source of inspiration for me. I grew up obsessed with a particular collection of books long before my studio filled to the brim with photobooks, artists’ books and zines. The bottom shelf of some place that we lived in the 1970’s held an engrossing Time-Life book series called The Family Creative Workshop. My mother dreaded the big mess brewing whenever she caught me crouched in the corner paging through the possibilities of what to make.
About one week of each summer break throughout elementary school involved making things with my great-grandmother. I loved watching her look down into the ground glass of her Argus Seventy-five which was always within her reach and a huge part of her daily routine. She photographed the plants growing around her every day, throughout the seasons and over her lifetime. Having lived through the Great Depression she repurposed everything. We cut up her wedding dress with its fancy petticoat in order to sew a new set of clothes for her china dolls. Together we stuffed a special pillow for her cat with cat hair that she had carefully collected over the year. She cut out a photograph of her face to attach to a body modeling control top pantyhose and taped that collage to her refrigerator in an effort to control her appetite. I closely studied her magical collage gestures before I even understood what it was that she was doing. Now I have a timeline of photographic processes over my great-grandmother’s lifetime. I regularly dip into trunks filled with her pictures and her photocollage hangs in my studio with me as I rework photographic information.
When I first began seriously studying photography we were required to have two finished and matted gelatin silver prints in class each Friday for critique. This schedule was a formative introduction to what the life of an artist could be. I presented at least one photo-collage for every crit and that continued throughout all of my photography classes and even into grad school when I would piece together larger-than life photographic bodies to make two giant silver gelatin mural print photo-collages weekly.
My earliest photographic impulse came of a desire to dissect my photographs to better understand to how pictures are constructed. Even though my cut-up efforts regularly elicited confusing responses I somehow managed to follow my own interests relatively undeterred. Maybe this is because I have always regarded photographs as material to manipulate having grown up watching my great-grandmother write captions on all sides of her drugstore prints while also cutting up her photographic records to reorganize her personal information. Or it could be that my own curiosities about the many different ways that all things photographic circulate through the world is a more powerful magnet than the criticism. On occasion it helps to remind myself that everything I make is layered and complicated and not for everybody but it remains true to me.
©Aimée Beaubien, Dangling Cluster, 2020 cut-up photographs, paracord, miniature clothespins, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, branch dimensions variable Kismet, Monaco Gallery, Saint Louis, MO
What sparked the idea of making your photographs sculptural?
I spent decades puzzling together a complex of picture relationships, weaving layers of pictured subjects over and under but realized through conversation that other people did not see what I saw. And even worse, when my cut-up photocollages are documented or framed behind glass everything is utterly compressed into a single flattened thing. This disappointment encouraged a stronger urge to figure out different ways to represent my lived experiences with photographic information. A gradual transition began by pushing my 2-d collages off of the wall just enough and directing artificial light sources to create dramatic shadows that underscored their object-ness. Then I moved on to figuring out how to cut and bend photographs more aggressively into sculptural forms. The first big step was cutting up photographs that I had taken of baskets in order to weave them back into basket forms.
Shortly thereafter I was completely entranced by a collection of hinged sheet metal sculptures from the 1960’s created by Lygia Clark’s that she called ‘Bichos’ (critters). In Clark’s 2014 MOMA retrospective there was an invitation to handle replicas of these captivating creatures in order to navigate your own experience of folding and unfolding her sculptures. The hinges implied movement and change with no clearly defined front and back, inside and outside, up and down. These sculptures embodied all of the gestures that I had been trying in vain to express in my 2-d photo collages. I returned to Chicago emboldened to make even bigger moves in photo-sculpture and very quickly threw myself into constructing immersive environments comprised of entangled photographic material. At about the same time I noticed a vine that had started winding around our ancient garage that made the wooden structure appear sturdier as it grew and thickened. Soon I was paying closer attention to stray morning glories as they strangled other plants in our tiny garden. Now I am completely mesmerized by the movement of vines, their steadfast embrace of everything that they encounter and have modeled forms of creating after the various ways that vines touch their surroundings.
©Aimée Beaubien, Plumb and Twining, 2020 cut-up photographs, paracord, miniature clothespins, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, branch dimensions variable Kismet, Monaco Gallery, Saint Louis, MO
What are the challenges of working with such complex installations?
Tight time constraints for install is hands down my biggest challenge. Some galleries regularly hang straightforward shows in one day. During the pandemic I had one day to install something and carefully choreographed everything beforehand in order to complete my fastest installation ever. It felt like I was on game show without the balloons or celebratory streamers at the finish line. In my studio I rehearse parts of an installation from start to finish in order to calculate how long the whole install might take and to determine what materials are needed. I take notes, list what must travel out of my studio with me, photograph important details before taking anything apart to finally pack everything that is needed to reassemble my work on location.
Chicago is filled with awesome galleries and killer alternative spaces. Whenever there is a chance to exhibit close to home I try something new to me knowing that my studio and supplies are easy to access nearby. Local exhibitions are also really important experiences that go a long way in preparation for out-of-town opportunities. Problem-solving is a challenge that I really enjoy. I ask myself a series of questions like what could a solo exhibition overseas be if everything had to fit inside of a duffle bag for transport? I have encountered several exhibition environments that did not allow drilling into the ceiling so sometimes the first moments of install require careful examination of alternative scenarios that do not detract from the impact of my overall plan.
My biggest disappointments have been when I did not spend more time documenting the install process from start to finish. I get hyper focused on what I am doing and often forget to take breaks to photograph. While trying to photograph my work I have found that the documentation often swallows itself whole and, in the process, generates new images and ideas to work from. I continue to experiment with different ways to document my work and bang up against the dizzying condition of trying to encompass all of the unruly parts. Because my immersive environments tend to have a maximalist aesthetic people often ask when I know my installation is done. For me it feels finished when I start removing more elements than I am adding. More is more and if I can afford the extravagance of bringing a surplus of material I always do because inevitably unanticipated alternatives will be revealed while spending extended periods of time working in an unfamiliar location.
©Aimée Beaubien, Hothouse Cuttings, 2018 cut-up photographs, printed satin, grow lights on fabric cord, hammock chair swings, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, dried lemons, dried plants dimensions variable Birds and Bees, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN
Do you create work for a particular space?
Multiple things happen in my studio simultaneously. I am always making something, testing materials, repurposing works, documenting various stages of development, researching and planning. When I am preparing for an installation I explore many different ways that my work could occupy that particular space. The thrilling aspect of building installations for me is that each exhibition opportunity never feels the same nor does the work appear exactly the same from one situation to the next. In this way the work is very alive to me. It moves, transforms and new elements are always being introduced into each new installation. I am driven to experiment while taking into consideration how to react to the unique characteristics of each exhibition environment.
Last summer I was able to work in a local gallery for an entire month so there was even enough time to print new works in my home studio during the evenings that could be incorporated into the overall installation during the days. Since this opportunity happened during the pandemic I knew very few people would experience the installation in-person so I decided to purposely avoid locking down plans ahead of time in favor of exploring what could happen through improvisation. I had just pulled down 30 feet of continuous vine from our garage and knew that it would be the starting point but I did not allow myself to think any further until I wrestled that giant vine through the space. The overall experience was exhilarating, primarily because I had plenty of time to take anything apart that was not working. If the install time had been shorter it would have been far too stressful to risk showing up without a master plan.
©Aimée Beaubien, rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils, 2020 cut-up photographs, paracord, polymer chains, porcelain chains, grow lights on fabric cord, miniature clothespins, vintage garden books, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, dried lemons, dried plants, branches dimensions variable Open Studio: rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils, 062 Gallery, Chicago, IL
What is your dream venue to exhibit work?
It is useful to ask myself this terrific question regularly as an open-ended prompt. While walking through any exhibition environment I imagine how my work could inhabit the space and respond to the specific characteristics of each different place. I dream about working in a largescale site over a longer period of time. My fantasies are vast and include, but are not limited to: a sprawling warehouse environment, an elaborately decorative palazzo in Venice (really anywhere – encountering contemporary works inside ornate interior architecture is riveting), a home museum or exhibition space in a home, all project spaces (especially those that are unconventional), a moving vessel like a ship, just about any artist run exhibition arena, a conservatory, outdoors in a town square, garden, park or arboretum… what about a whole island if I am really dreaming? Gosh, I guess I am really open to considering just about anything. In the meantime, I continue to lean into daydreams with fairy tale budgets.
©Aimée Beaubien, Twist Affix, 2017 cut-up photographs, grow lights on fabric cord, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, dried lemons, dried plants, oscillating fan dimensions variable Twist Affix, RAC Freeark Gallery, Riverside, IL
Do you think you will ever go back to the framed image (if you ever worked that way)?
Right now, I am drawn to experiencing photographic material expressed in various states of potential: movement, flux, transformation, fragility, weight, growth. Some of my works that have been packaged in frames end up feeling utterly past tense to me these days. It seems as if the urgency of that particular impulse to make something has been squashed with all of the lifeforce sucked out of it. I am far too embarrassed to admit how many framed pieces are currently stored in our basement but I am very fond of my framed gelatin silver print collages that hang in my bedroom. Occasionally I think about switching out my work to replace it with that of friends because I so want to live with their awesome artwork. That has yet to happen since I have a hard time sacrificing studio time. Would I ever frame anything again? Yes, and I do but only when I know it is best suited for the final destination.
©Aimée Beaubien, Cuttings, 2017 cut-up photographs, grow lights on fabric cord, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, dried lemons, dried plants dimensions variable Cuttings, Platform Gallery, Evanston, IL
©Aimée Beaubien, About Leaves, 2017 cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins dimensions variable Twist Affix, RAC Freeark Gallery, Riverside, IL
Tags: Aimée Beaubien, Installation, photo-sculpture
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Artist Talk with Aimée Beaubien 2020 San Francisco Camerawork Exhibition Award Winner
On March 23rd, SF Camerawork hosted an artist talk with Aimée Beaubien, the recipient of the 2020 San Francisco Camerawork Exhibition Award. The SF Camerawork Exhibition Award recognizes a project proposal featuring exceptional creative photographic work and supports those efforts with an exhibition grant in the amount of $5,000. Aimée Beaubien spoke about her photographic process and shared a series of recent works and influences in an artist talk followed by a Q&A.
Beaubien's photo-based installations and artists’ books explore networks of associations between the archive, the ephemeral and the photographic. Photographed plants, interlaced vines, woven topographies merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature.
The 2020 San Francisco Camerawork Exhibition Award has been generously supported by individual donors and by the Delabos-Yamrus Fund.
Creative Quarantine: Artist Aimeé Beaubien
Artist Aimée Beaubien discusses how she has been using her time during the pandemic and the creative work that has come out of it. She shares some of her favorite resources and artists that have been keeping her inspired and energized during this time.
Twist Affix | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, dried plants, grow light on fabric cord, oscillating fan | © Aimée Beaubien, 2017
1. How are you holding up?
I’m holding on.
I continue to experiment with different ways to wrangle ambiguity amidst such profound turbulence.
Dangling Cluster | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, gilded leaves, PLA filament leaf drawings, paracord, tree branch | © Aimée Beaubien, 2020
2. Has Covid-19 had an effect on your work? If so, in what way?
The beginning of the pandemic felt piercingly eerie. My last walk through our school hallways brought back palpable memories of being in the same exact physical space as a student in the early days of the AIDS epidemic when so much was frighteningly unknown.
Hothouse Picture-Cyclopedia | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, polymer chains, porcelain chains, PLA filament leaf drawings, vintage garden books, dried plants grow lights on fabric cord | © Aimée Beaubien, 2020
Things are definitely shifting. After 23 consecutive years of teaching, I am on my very first sabbatical. I haven’t had time to myself like this since graduate school in 1991. A sabbatical feels like the most precious gift that I do not want to squander. Every day I wake up with raw questions about what I am doing. Everything feels intensified in our current conditions. If I experience any sense of immobility I concentrate on advice I might give to a student. That usually manages to shake things loose and then I get to work.
rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, polymer chains, porcelain chains, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, dried plants, vintage garden books, grow lights on fabric cord | © Aimée Beaubien, 2020
3. Is there anything you’ve added to your practice that you’d like to keep after this is over?
Before, in a race to keep up with demands split between teaching and making, my thoughts were continuously interrupted. Now, while so many things are suspended there is more time than ever to think.
rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, polymer chains, porcelain chains, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, dried plants, vintage garden books, grow lights on fabric cord | © Aimée Beaubien, 2020
Over the summer I built an immersive installation at 062 Gallery. A friend visited and to my delight, they immediately responded to the balance of grace and threat. For some time, I have been looking closely at plant movements in my immediate environment while also photographing the ever-changing conditions in my studio as plants dry and projects grow. One day a vine began growing near me and I have since tracked its voracious progress around the garage and along the side of our home. I am mesmerized by this vines steadfast embrace of all that it encounters and have modeled forms of creating after the various ways that vines touch their surroundings. Vines move with grace and threaten what they encounter with strangleholds meant to further their reach.
Tangled Sensations | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, dried plants, grow lights on fabric cord, hammock chair swings | © Aimée Beaubien, 2018
My husband cut that vine at its base in order to replace rotting wood around our garage. I pulled down nearly 30 feet of continuous vine and stretched it through the exhibition space at 062. Everything grew from that first move. I just dismantled my summer’s installation, rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils, less than 24 hours ago and have already headed into deep reflection as I anticipate new directions. Moving forward I hope to hold onto time for thinking and discovering greater connections.
Contact | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, blue lights on fabric cord | © Aimée Beaubien, 2019
4. Of the artists you follow, who is handling this particularly well?
Jenny Drumgoole continues to blow me away! She immediately converted her basement into an extra special portal and began creating an ongoing series of whip-smart parodies loosely called Amazon Review Remote School. These videos shorts did wonders to help me cope with the abrupt shift to remote teaching at the very start of the stay-at-home orders. Thank you SOXX from the bottom of my heart!
Hothouse | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, grow lights on fabric cord, candlestick, wooden table | © Aimée Beaubien, 2015
Instagram updates from William O’Brien cheer me up. A favorite is Bill riding his unicycle in front of a wall of his DO NOT FEAR VOTING IS NEAR posters. In the captions, he declares “Yes I have officially lost it! #getloudgetweird #createtheworldyouwant”. Early on there were invites to a meditation group he was leading in Zoom. Bill continues to provide studio updates and encouraging self-care while distributing his compelling poster campaign to get out the VOTE.
Cuttings | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, dried plants, grow light on fabric cord | © Aimée Beaubien, 2017
I savored every post from Sam Ramos, writer, and educator at the Art Institute of Chicago. While I am happy AIC has reopened I miss Sam’s personal reflections on artworks when the museum was shuttered during the quarantine. “March 15, 2020. JMW Turner, “Valley of Aosta: Snowstorm, Avalanche, and Thunderstorm,” 1836/7 (detail). Possibly the most dramatic couple of inches in the entire museum. Look up the full painting for scale. A disaster befalling a family. A woman in agony being held back by a loved one. Wrenching anguish. Impending doom. Gestures of love, and support. Some feel European painting isn’t relevant anymore, but when do human stories go out of style? I’m a POC from the East Side of Austin and I see myself in this work. I relate to this 19th c. British man’s vision. We’re connected, you see. All of us. Everyone who has ever existed or ever will exist. We are the universe seeing itself. We’re the elegant, chaotic experience resonant in paint. #theartinstiuteofchicago”
rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, polymer chains, porcelain chains, PLA filament leaf drawings, gilded leaves, dried plants, vintage garden books, grow lights on fabric cord | © Aimée Beaubien, 2020
I love seeing what people are making and am definitely leaning into Instagram in lieu of in-person viewing. I am always so happy to see work by former students, drawings by Carol Jackson, collages by @loyola_condenser, the wondrous blur of work-life-parenting in posts from Marzena Abrahamik, Allison Grant, Sonja Thomsen, and so many very others.
Hothouse Cuttings | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, dried plants, grow lights on fabric cord, hammock chair swings | © Aimée Beaubien, 2015
5. Are there any artists, filmmakers, albums, or genres you’ve been drawn to during the crisis? If so, why?
Since I am not in a classroom with artists for the first time in a very long time I find myself plugging into online content about creative production. It has been thrilling to tap into streaming programming from near and far. Some favorites include: MoCP Photos at Zoom, MoCP Behind the Lensand just about any artist talk from Filter Photo, SAIC Visiting Artists Program, SF Camerawork along with loads of offerings from museums.
Hothouse Picture-Cyclopedia | dimensions variable | cut-up photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, polymer chains, porcelain chains, PLA filament leaf drawings, vintage garden books, dried plants grow lights on fabric cord | © Aimée Beaubien, 2020
I’ve been listening to podcasts and audiobooks while working in the studio. Often I listen more than once because my mind wanders. Some favorites include: Merlin Sheldrake reading his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures; Ocean Vuong reading his book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; The Modern Art Notes Podcast, The Great Women Artists Podcast.
And periodically I turn up music loudly for much needed dancing interludes!
Studio self-portrait | © Aimée Beaubien, 2020
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience in collage, immersive installations, and artists’ books. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997.
Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection
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