Hothouse Picture-Cyclopedia

Filter Photo is pleased to present Hothouse Picture-Cyclopedia, an installation by Aimée Beaubien, on display in the Milk Room Cases at Chicago Athletic Association. Hothouse Picture-Cyclopedia consists of cut-up photographs, para-cord, netting, polymer chains, porcelain chains, china cups, dried lemons, grow lights on fabric cord, and books (Garden Flowers In Color: A Picture-Cyclopedia of Flowers by Daniel J. Foley).

“The imaginative expanse of the home, museum, and garden holds me. In it, lines blur between public and private, institutional and domestic, labor and leisure, propagation and contemplation. Wild, fast-growing vines slink through the yard and climb around our house. Inside my home studio, plants mingle with huge tangles of cut and woven photographs that dangle down from the ceiling. I photograph the ever-changing conditions in my studio as plants dry and projects grow.

With my camera, I move through different types of collections reflecting on our attachments to objects, focusing on the complex tethers between an individual and the things they collect. The spliced open and folded, the domestic and the collected, the intersecting and multidirectional structure: these are the substance of my photographic cut-ups that take form in artists’ books, collages, sculptures, and installations.

I document my own personal entanglements with domestic spaces, institutions, archives, and narratives suggested by objects and histories. From my photographs, I create ephemeral paper structures that accommodate, attach to, climb, trail, cling, spread, creep and rearrange within each new exhibition environment: loudly, brightly. My work draws from an environment of hyperstimulation, compulsion, and interruption; comparing the disjointed experience of attention and distraction to the sharp recontextualization of collage.” —Aimée Beaubien

About the Artist

Aimée Beaubien lives and works in Chicago. Her cut-up photographic collages, photo-based sculptures, and installations explore collapses in time, space and place, while meditating on notions of collecting and collections. Solo and two-person exhibitions include oqbo galerie, Berlin, Germany; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI; BOX 13 Artspace, Houston, TX; Johalla Projects, Chicago, IL; TWIN KITTENS, Atlanta, GA; and Demo Projects, Springfield, IL. Group exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL; Bikini Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA; and UCRC Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as Art in America, Art on Paper, and Art Papers. Her artists’ books have been acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago, IL. Beaubien is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.

On View: October 1 – 23, 2019

Location: Chicago Athletic Association | 12 S Michigan Ave