By Christina Nafziger
When viewing a photograph, we often look for ways to enter the image. We look for things we recognize, things that are familiar to us. We digest what is relatable and often project our own meaning onto it. In the work of Chicago-based artist Aimée Beaubien, this experience is altered, the process shifted. There is still an entering of the work, as the artist creates immersive installations that transform the once flat snapshot into a dimensional sculpture. However, the meaning is not projected by the viewer, but is instead spread out across the numerous images that surround them. The photographs in Beaubien’s work grow organically like vines that hang from the ceiling, or like rolling waves cascading through the air. In her piece Hold Sway, these suspended photographs create a movement like rushing water, with the light from nearby windows shining through the semi-transparent images like light shining through leaves of a tree. Beaubien explains, “I wanted the shape of the installation to feel like unstable land shaped over time by the forces of plate tectonics and volcanic activity. I suspended my landscape photographs, like plates shifting in the space of the exhibition, to mimic some of the uneven landmasses in Iceland.”
Each image in her installations appears to the viewer much like fragments of a memory, with the paracord that connects the images functioning like a brain synapse, impulsively trying to string together these fragments, creating an endless web that is both compelling and addictively overwhelming. While spending time with Beaubien’s piece Hold Sway at Heaven Gallery, a small gallery space in Chicago’s Wicker Park, I felt lost in her work—lost in the way you lose track of time when exploring nature or wandering through a new museum. I felt this same sense of wonderment when I stepped into the artist’s studio space. Photographs were hanging in every corner, either on the walls or from the ceiling. Source material sat on every surface, revealing to me an endless sea of inspiration. I suspected Beaubien to be an avid collector, since her work contained so much visual imagery. I asked the artist where this imagery came from. Were the images in her work photographs that she took herself, or were they found images? Where did they come from? She began with the origin of her ongoing project With Inger.
“I was at a residency in Reykjavik during the month of June in 2018. On my third day there I visited the photo museum. Since I was not familiar with Icelandic photographers I spent a lot of time at the museum paging through many published books in their bookshop that were new to me. While reading an article about the museum, I learned that their collection holds six million images - from commercial photography to fine art to personal family photos - with a focus on photographic subjects related specifically to Iceland. Democratic collections, such as this, are endlessly fascinating to me. Such sweeping archives appeal to my collage sensibilities because encounters with unlikely mash-ups between time periods and subject matter happen easily. While in the reading room of the museum, I noticed two walls of bookcases filled with three ring binders of contact sheets representing the history of photography in Iceland. Then I found the binder of Inger Helene Boasson. Initially, it wasn’t entirely obvious to me why I was so drawn to her unedited black-and-white 35mm contact sheets. Inger’s images were from the early 1970’s, so I was immediately transported to the era of my childhood. Then, I even recognized some of the places in Iceland she had photographed that I was just encountering for the first time. I guess the real pull was from being familiar in an uncanny past/present way. I impulsively took a photograph of every contact sheet in her binder and returned to my residency studio to process all of the images. I quickly discovered photos Inger had taken in the neighborhood pool I had been visiting daily because the structure had not changed in over 30 years. I looked even more closely.”
“Then, I started searching online for more information about Inger and discovered that she was a full-time photographer at the hospital in Reykjavik. I started combining my photographs with her photographs and taking photos while imagining what she might photograph today. I thought, ‘I will make enough work and then I'm going to contact her because I have so many questions.’ But then, a curator at the photo museum told me she had recently passed away. And I was shocked!”
These photographs appear throughout Beaubien’s work. Her installation Hold Sway has a combination of her own photography and the photographs taken by Inger, fusing them together and creating a space for a conversation within the work, one that can never happen in person. The artist manipulates the photographs by altering their scale and color, and by printing them on metallic or translucent paper. Hyper saturated greens, magentas, and violets dominate her work. These hues give a sense of artificiality that provides a contrast to the organic qualities of her installations, forming a dichotomy that challenges the reality of the photographs.
Beauben’s work is driven aesthetically and conceptually by elements of the organic, or rather, the garden, which she described in her essay “Botanical Speculations.” After reading this essay (which I highly recommend reading on her website!) it was so interesting to see her photographic and sculptural work hanging directly next to dried plants in her studio. As a gardener herself, she says, “I'm constantly photographing plants—the things that are growing around me and the things that I'm encountering.” In her studio, woven photographs dangle from the celling next to suspended dried flowers—and she uses the same type of cord to hang both. In Beaubien’s essay, she discusses her attraction to the garden and her work’s relation to it. The idea of the garden and growth can be seen in her work, as each of her installations seem to transform and grow within each gallery they inhabit. Like wild ivy, they transform the space and engulf the viewer visually. Each piece becomes a living, breathing entity that has a life of its own—taking on new form in each installation. Beaubien explains that these works are all, “different iterations, because the installation material is always growing and changing depending on where I hang the work.” In some of her installations, she uses household objects along with the photographs. “For my installation at Demo Projects, I wanted to include domestic objects because the exhibition space was a house slated for demolition. I create a jumbled pile of crazy hot orange and pink painted furniture with a vine-like bean stock of woven photos scrambling over the entire heap. It’s kind of like nature taking over. I also incorporated all of the bottles of wine that I drank over a year. Then, I added dried lemons and dried limes, to combine sour with the sweet. I keep making more raw material for future exhibitions.”
This method of physically altering photography and combining materials came from a lifelong love of collage. Naturally, the cutting and reconstructing that happens when making a collage transformed into something more. Eventually, Beaubien pushed the boundaries of photography into the third-dimension, drastically changing the way the viewer interacts with a photograph.
“I was less and less satisfied with the way that people were interacting with my work. For me, I experience all of the layers, but when I talked to people while they were looking at my collages, they wouldn't see the layers. My physically combined imagery had flattened out again. This motivated me to make my work more dimensional and hopefully it is easier to see the ways that I'm putting things together. I have no training in sculpture so I grab all sorts of different things from around the house to help prop up my photographs in space as the work evolves into sculpture and installation.”
While walking through Beaubien’s studio with her, I could see this transformation. I could see the physical evolving of her photographs as they appeared sometimes whole, sometimes in strips, and other times woven together. Before our studio visit, she had just finished another residency at artist Roger Brown’s estate in New Buffalo, Michigan; a residency reserved for faculty and staff at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Beaubien works as a full-time photography professor. Roger Brown was an avid collector who had no hierarchy in his collecting, much like the collection at the photography museum in Iceland. This collection is held in his house in Chicago, and is open to the public. For one year, Beaubien photographed the objects in this collection, and during her residency at his estate in Michigan, she created a new piece from these photographs. The resulting installation is one that is overwhelmingly layered and complex, filling at least three-quarters of the space.
This collection of images acknowledges the act of archiving itself, as the archive often builds off of itself and has the potential to transform into something new. For Beaubien, everything in her work is interconnected and interdependent. Like a collection, an archive, or even a family album, everything is building, evolving, growing. Each visual stems from the last. She is the gardener gathering the seeds—in this case, the seeds being found photography, and allowing the visuals to grow, taking on a life of their own within the photographs she takes herself. Within her work Beaubien is not only transforming imagery to create her immersive installations, she is altering the way a flat photograph functions, bending and suspending it in space to create a new, layered experience.
