Panel Conversation: Photographic World-Building - 3 Artists: Aimée Beaubien, Allison Grant and Guanyu Xu

Moderated by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Executive Director, SF Camerawork

Saturday, June 25, 2022
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM PDT

On Saturday, June 25, 2022 Aimée Beaubien, Allison Grant and Guanyu Xu discussed their artistic practices in the context of photographic world-building. Using photo-based installation, site-specific interventions, and constructed images, each of these artists creates new visual and experiential worlds that interrogate the function of photography, as well as environmental and socio-political concerns.

Aimée Beaubien’s immersive installations that combine cut and woven photographs of plants, plant materials, and mixed media additions hung from the ceiling, provide an experience of the complicated effects produced by the intersection of the real and the photographic. Beaubien, whose SF Camerawork installation, Matter in the Hothouse, is currently on view in Gallery 106 at Minnesota Street Project, is Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

Using plastics and other synthetic materials to create representations of natural landscapes, Allison Grant’s series, Unsoiled combines environmental science and her interest in the impact of human refuse on ecology and the global environment. Grant’s photographs examine the conflict when the two merge and illustrate how refuse is in many ways here to stay as a presence in the landscape. Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Alabama.

Influenced by the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China, Guanyu Xu examines the production of power in photography to the question of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes. Xu will speak about his work, Resident Aliens, which presents photographic installations within immigrants' interior spaces to examine their personal histories and complex experiences. By photographing the layered images of immigrants’ interior spaces, belongings, personal photo archives, and pictures of places they captured, the project blurs the boundaries between the familiar and foreignness, private and public, belonging and alienation. Xu is a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently based in Chicago.

The panel discussion is moderated by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Executive Director, SF Camerawork.

Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the archive, the ephemeral, and the photographic in collages, artist books, and immersive installations. Her work has appeared in national and international exhibitions including at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; UCRC Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy; Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL; Chicago Cultural Center, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN; Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; TWIN KITTENS, Atlanta, GA; and Demo Projects, Springfield, IL. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997. More of Beaubien’s work can be seen at aiméebeaubien.com

徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu (b.1993 Beijing) is an artist currently based in Chicago and a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Influenced by the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China, Xu’s practice extends from examining the production of power in photography to the question of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes. In his work, Xu migrates between mediums like photography, new media, and installation. These movements operate similarly to his displaced and fractured identity. His works have been exhibited internationally including the International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Orlean Museum of Art, New Orleans; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others. View work by Guanyu Xu at https://www.xuguanyu.com/.