November 2023 AIR: Aimée Beaubien
Aimée talks about the intricate relationship between nature and technology.
Matter in the Hothouse, 2022
Hey Aimée! We’re so excited to have you join the lab in October. Can you talk to us a bit about the journey that led you to make your most recent body of work ‘Into the Hothouse’?
I’m fascinated by the intricate relationship between nature and technology. My studio day begins with looking at what is growing around me, snapping photos of leaves from the plants in my own home and garden. I'm utterly fascinated by how those vines adapt and connect with their surroundings. This curiosity is what propels me to craft structures that mirror the interconnectedness of the natural world.
Around 2015, I began making a series of site-specific installations with the central theme of a hothouse, a deliberately hybrid environment designed to nurture rapid development. I draw inspiration from nature's patterns to create intricate assemblages that echo the interwoven ecological world. I see these compositions as a web of interpretive data, kind of like the way we interpret photographs. They take on different forms, almost like biological systems. Just like the lively movements of vines, I cut, knot, and weave together various elements like snapshots, chains, books, and plant matter. This whole process creates networks that stretch across both visual and architectural spaces.
As I continue experimenting, I turn clusters of materials, gathered, printed, and crafted with my own hands, into intricate compositions. These compositions convey an imaginative wilderness and embody connections between natural and constructed environments, the tangible and the aspirational, and the interplay of memory and photography.
Your work seems to highlight and radiate warmth, what significance does color, light, texture, and movement have in your work?
Color, light, texture, and movement are all key players in my work. While my formative training was black and white analog photography I have embraced vibrant color palettes available through inkjet printing. I take inspiration from scientific imaging techniques that use artificial colors to reveal hidden properties we can't see with the naked eye. By intentionally playing with color, I'm building intricate networks of images that capture the sensory overload we encounter in our media-rich world.
This year, I've been trying some new things. I've introduced motor-assisted movement into my work. These motors gently tug on paracord, which, in turn, makes materials like branches wrapped in bioplastic, snapshots and leaves move through space. It's not just about the visuals; it's about engaging your senses. The sound produced by these motors adds depth to my installations and might remind you of the artificial white noise from digital transmissions or the hum of mechanized life support systems. My aim is to create a multi-sensory experience that draws you with a sense of belonging to discover many unfolding connections within my world-building.
When I look at your work it feels like I'm entering a different world. How does fantasy and world-building play into your creative process?
That is so great to hear! I definitely give myself room to fantasize about how I can transform a conventional exhibition space into another world. When I can control the exhibition lighting design, I have felt transported to cave interiors, immersed underwater, and deep into forests.
You know, I often think about how experience is flattened into pictures. This curiosity drives me to discover different ways to slice into and reassemble these representations, creating multi-layered encounters with the subject and a picture of that subject. When I'm in the creative zone, it all feels like an adventure, filled with invention, imagination, fantasy, and world building.
I'd love to know more about what inspires you to create these large scale installations and pieces of work. What is the aim and process of making larger-than-life work?
Photographs and plants are intricately interwoven throughout the fabric of my work. In a world where nature is being increasingly depleted, I utilize the photographic medium's capacity for infinite reproduction to envision a boundless propagation of plant life. Within my immersive installations, this printed abundance populates the field of vision through varied representations of living forms. The work encourages an engagement with perceptual shifts between what is depicted and what is tangible, nurtures connections to the natural world, and cultivates a heightened awareness of our relationship with it.
My work leans heavily on the aesthetics of cut-up collage, creating sharp recontextualization. This technique helps me draw connections between contemporary life and the fragmented state of nature. This dynamic interplay between the natural world, displaced nature, and simulation is a central theme in what I do. I amplify and magnify the presentation of materials in my installations to encourage emotional connections to vivid models of interdependence within the ecological world.
What has been inspiring you and your work lately? Perhaps there's a poem, book, song, or film that's at the top of your mind.
Oh, I've got a deep and fulfilling well of inspiration. Lately, I've been really captivated by the life and work of Alice Shaddle (1928-2017). She was quite the Chicago artist, exhibiting and teaching for over 50 years. A series of photographs documenting ephemeral paper installations in her home (the George Blossom House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Hyde Park) are hovering in my imagination.
She was also a founding member of Artemisia Gallery and a long-time teacher at the Hyde Park Art Center. I just read something she said in 2006 that has really stuck with me, "I [now] realize... that I have dwelt on what I wanted to become a visual sublimation as an answer to the anguish that day left within us. And so now my thoughts seem jumbled and tumbled, swirling strange and unreal rather than quiet thoughtfulness, which I believe these collages convey."
An exhibition called "Alice Shaddle: Fuller Circles" is coming up at the Hyde Park Art Center from March 23 to June 16, 2024, and I can't wait to see it! It's artists like her who keep me inspired and motivated.
Garden Flowers in Color, 2020
Matter in the Hothouse, 2022
Rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils, 2020
Portrait By: Marzena Abrahamik
Aimée Beaubien
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Her cut-up photographic collages, installations and artist books explore networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal. 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. Beaubien’s work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997.