Aimée Beaubien, Twist Affix, 2017
It is our great pleasure to present the inaugural SF Camerawork Exhibition Award to artist Aimée Beaubien 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.
Beaubien's proposal was selected to receive the grant from a pool of over 200 applicants. 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. New work funded by this grant will be used to build a photo-based installation utilizing the unique characteristics of the exhibition space at SF Camerawork to map networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal, memory and the photographic. For Matter in the Hothouse, cut-up photographic forms will interweave, encircle, and hang.”
Qualities of the garden run parallel to the nature of photography: both are defined by interactions of the scientific, the accidental and the temporal. Attentive to perceptual shifts between the depicted and touchable, Beaubien manipulates her photographs into becoming a series of moving parts, pushing their capacity to change and to transform. While walking through one of her installations photographic elements slip between recognition and abstraction. Bold leaf shapes and twisting ribbons of photos entwine, cluster and creep. 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.
The SF Camerawork Exhibition Award will be a part of SF Camerawork's 2021 - 2022 programming schedule, and we look forward to hosting you all next year for this exhibition.
The 2020 San Francisco Camerawork Exhibition Award has been generously supported by individual donors and by the Delabos-Yamrus Fund.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Her cut-up photographic collages, photo-based sculptures and installations explore collapses in time, space and place, while engaging the complexities of visual perception. Solo exhibitions include Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy; Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL; Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; TWIN KITTENS, Atlanta, GA; and Demo Projects, Springfield, IL. Beaubien is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
Aimée Beaubien, (sculpture on right) Rejoining Roger Brown - What's happening now, 2015 and Hothouse, 2015
