Shifting Outlook

About the Photographer

Beaubien, Aimée

American, b. 1966

Chicago-based artist Aimée Beaubien constructs optically perplexing arrangements from fragments of her own photographs. Cutting and reconstructing her images, she hybridizes media, inventing forms that combine sculpture and collage in a matrix of shifting planes and disorienting relations of scale. Vastly different photographic experiences--of nature, the arts, and the urban environment--are interwoven in each assemblage, collapsing the specificities of their making into one singular object. In this way, Beaubien tests the flexibility of photographic representation, using the documentary capacity of the medium only to cite colors, patterns, and spaces. Obscuring their sources, Beaubien’s cut-outs overlap in tangled shapes both on and off the wall, in their myriad intersections. Beaubien is Assistant Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.