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Aimee Beaubien at Carl Hammer - Chicago - Brief Article
Art in America, March, 2002 by Susan Snodgrass
Aimee Beaubien established her career during the culture wars of the early 1990s. Her controversial photographic series "Stimulating Objects" (1993), close-up images of vaginas penetrated by common objects, sparked national attention while the artist was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Woman's body as a site of both objectification and empowerment has been the subject of Beaubien's subsequent work, photographic deconstructions of the female nude, usually the artist's own body, reconfigured through collage and printed to human scale. Tattooed with handwritten declarations, her visceral images of vaginas, headless torsos and disembodied breasts and limbs confront the viewer with political urgency, simultaneously broadening the discourse on female sexuality.
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The same conceptual territory is traversed in her most recent exhibition, "Transmotion," although here the artist employs several new formal devices, resulting in images that, despite their subtlety, are no less compelling than the earlier work. For instance, Beaubien is no longer the subject ot these photos; instead, she works with a model, turning the camera's gaze outward rather than inward, toward an anonymous female figure. The life-size forms of her previous work give way in this latest series to a smaller, intimate scale, with the effect that her work seems to shift into the realm of private fantasy and the subconscious. Lastly, she has done away with the brash, graffitilike texts that defined her earlier compositions. In the 20 new photocollages, constructed by layering repeated images of body parts, torsos and limbs, the backgrounds of her black-and-white nudes are painted in muted hues of purplish grays, rusts and blues--pigments that emulate various darkroom processes, such as solarization.
These strategies intentionally imbue the new work with a modernist aura, and many of her images directly reference Edward Weston and Hans Bellmer. However, Beaubien is more politically aligned with Dadaists John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch, who used photomontage as an oppositional tool. Thus, Beaubien's reconstructions of the Surrealist canon emancipate the female nude from the violence of misogyny, yet pay homage to modernist experimentation. Fragmented, then pieced together through collage into dynamic, geometric tableaux, her figures writhe in a private dance or ritual. In fact, she titles her compositions "Reels," suggesting movement and the cinematic; by adding painterly elements to the mix, she blurs the distinctions among photography, painting, performance and film. This hybridity is close to Bataille's concept of l'informe. Transgressing the boundaries of high and low, fetishism and beauty, Beaubien offers a representation of woman as both sensual and limitless.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
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