“Leaning, shooting, bedded, staked, staying. Drooping, reclining, pitched, and placed. Sloping, jutting, braced. Holding, heaped. Planted and spread. My recent collage-based installations map networks of meaning and association between the garden, the ephemeral, and the photographic. Qualities of the garden run parallel to the nature of photography: they are spaces defined by interactions of the scientific, the accidental, and the temporal." -- Aimée Beaubien
Teetering between cultivation and wildness, Aimée Beaubien's solo exhibition Twist Affix at the Riverside Arts Center's Freeark Gallery takes the form of verdant mesh curtains made of interwoven strips of color photographs, taken in her own backyard garden in Chicago and her mother's garden in Florida. One curtain bisects the front gallery and is lit and shadowed to dazzling effect with intensely colorful hothouse grow lights.
Beaubien says of her unique, recombinatory approach to photography and sculptural process: "my collage practice is driven by the translational space between image and material, and by generative and cumulative strategies of making. I embrace the documentary capacity of the camera, recording what I encounter. My images become printed photographs, then sculptural forms. Cutting and reassembling, I draw with scissors. Within the visual and temporal entanglements of my installations, perception slips between recognition and abstraction: from a sky, a topography, or a textile, into fields of color and pattern and back again."
Beaubien sees the garden as a type of collection, noting that gardens "are the products of migration, accumulation, curation, and caprice. Culled from the orderliness of scientific taxonomies, we assemble our gardens for aesthetic pleasures, and for contact with wildness." Beaubien's hanging gardens at RAC thus extend and expand upon her longstanding interest in idiosyncratic collections and collecting practices, from the objects held in specialty museums like the Roger Brown Study Collection--which inspired Beaubien's project "Collecting Within," shown at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 2016 --to the quirky displays of personal artifacts found in ordinary people's homes, including her own.
For press inquiries and high-res images contact Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Isé: cise[at]riversideartscenter[dot]com.
****
The Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
32 East Quincy Street, Riverside, IL 60546
708-442-6400
www.riversideartscenter.com
Gallery Hours: Tue - Sat 1-5pm. Closed Sundays, Mondays and major holidays.
All of our exhibitions are free and open to the public.