October 29 – December 2, 2017
Curated by Claudine Isé, RAC Freeark Gallery Director
View of Aimée Beaubien’s Studio
The Riverside Art Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Aimée Beaubien.
“My work is created by physically cutting up my photographs and putting them back together in invented forms, playfully engaging the complexities of visual and visceral perception. Photography envisions the world as beguiling fragments. I use photography as a way to channel different spaces of engagement into new proximities. putting things together and tearing things apart, I practice performances of revision and re-imagining.”
I photograph what I encounter, employing the camera to capture raw material. This may include elements of the natural world, the biological world, or the constructed worlds of art exhibitions, craft objects, and urban environments. In my practice, the documentary capacity of photography is used as a notational form: citing colors, patterns, spaces, and the specificities of time and place.
What I capture through the lens continues to transform; I draw with scissors. The cut fragments generated are joined into a matrix of shifting panes and disorienting scale relationships. Collisions occur between what is made present in the photographs and what is made absent through acts of incising and extracting. The final constructions conjure a viewing experience that oscillates between modes of recognition and abstraction, testing the flexibility of photographic representation.
My photographs shift from pictures of things to objects comprised of pictures. Upsettin the traditional assumption of a rectilinear form for photographic work, the tangled shapes of my cut-outs overlap and intersect. Their interwoven forms upend expectations of foreground, background, objects, subject and motion. The physicality of these layered works activates opportunities for compelling paths of visual explorations through the fabric of my collages, tapping into our intuitive abilities to entertain multiple narratives.”
–Aimée Beaubien
Aimée Beaubien installation at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago