1275 Minnesota St /
SF Camerawork / Gallery 106
Aimée Beaubien: Matter in the Hothouse
Reception | Thursday, May 12, 2022 | 5:30–7:30 pm
SF Camerawork presents Chicago-based artist and winner of SF Camerawork’s 2020 Exhibit Award, Aimée Beaubien’s much-anticipated installation Matter in the Hothouse in Gallery #106, 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.
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.
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.
Register to visit the exhibition here.