FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SF Camerawork Opens Chicago Artist Aimée Beaubien’s Immersive Exhibition “Matter in the Hothouse”
When: May 12 - July 9, 2022
Opening Reception: Free, public reception, Thursday, Amy 12, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Where: 1275 Minnesota Street, Gallery 106 at Minnesota Street Project
Gallery Hours: Wednesdays through Saturdays, 11 am - 5 pm
San Francisco - April 6, 2022 - Chicago-based artist and winner of SF Camerawork’s 2020 Exhibit Award, Aimée Beaubien presents her much-anticipated installation Aimée Beaubien: Matter in the Hothouse, which had been postponed due to the Pandemic. Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, SF Camerawork’s Executive Director says of the exhibition “We are excited to finally be able to present this exhibit and welcome our audiences back to an in-person experience. Aimée Beaubien’s work fits perfectly with our mission to “provoke discovery, experimentation, and exchange through exhibitions and experiences for all who value new ideas in photography!”
Selected from a pool of over 200 applicants, Beaubien is creating an original, immersive installation comprised of cut and woven photographs of plants, organic plant materials, and mixed media additions that are hung from the ceiling in strips and waves, which visitors are invited to enter and carefully traverse.
Aimée Beaubien, Artist Studio Installation View for Matter in the Hothouse, cut and woven photographs, paracord, polymer chains, miniature clothespins, branch, leaves, tulips, filament drawings, dimensions variable, 2022
Erika Gentry, Programming Committee Chair, wrote of the proposal, "Beaubien's work stood out for its conceptual strength and innovative presentation, which animates photographs to become a series of moving parts, pushing their capacity to change and to transform.” Beaubien says of the opportunity to show at SF Camerawork: "I look forward to the tremendous opportunity to present a chain of experiential shifts between visual representation and the physical encounter. In this installation, everything is interconnected and the overall effect fights with attention to focus on a single photographic moment."
Beaubien mines qualities of the garden that run parallel to the nature of photography— both are defined by interactions of the scientific, the accidental, and the temporal. While walking through one of her installations, photographic elements seem to slip between recognition and abstraction. 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.
Aimée Beaubien, Twist Affix, cut and woven photographs, paracord, carabiners, miniature clothespins, oscillating fan, grow lights on fabric cord, gomphrena, eucalyptus, lemons, limes, fallen acorns, dimensions variable, 2017
About the Artist
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 http://www.Aiméebeaubien.com/
Opening Reception: Participation in the opening reception is free, but reservations are required. Reserve your place at SFCamerawork.org. Registration will open to the public on April 13th. Out of an abundance of caution, we ask visitors to wear a mask when inside the 1275 Minnesota Street Project Building, and respectfully urge anyone who has any symptoms of COVID or has recently been exposed to anyone with COVID to refrain from visiting. Reservations are also encouraged, but not mandatory, to view the exhibition.
An in-person artist conversation will be held on Saturday, July 9, from 11:15 am-12:30 pm at Minnesota Street Project. More information and registration link is forthcoming and will be available on the SF Camerawork.
About SF Camerawork
Founded in 1974, SF Camerawork’s mission is to encourage and support emerging artists to explore new directions and ideas in the photographic arts. Through exhibitions, publications, and educational programs, SF Camerawork strives to create an engaging platform for artistic exploration as well as community involvement and inquiry.
The Exhibition has been generously supported by Michelle Branch and Dale Cook,
the Delabos-Yamrus Fund, Philip Sager, M.D., and individual members of SF Camerawork
