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Aimée Beaubien for Western Pole

Aimee Beaubien

Aimee Beaubien is an artist based out of Chicago. She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Do the shapes of your cut outs have any connotations (celestial, design organic, etc)? Can you discuss these connotations? What kind of impact do you think it makes on the digestion of the work?

Is it possible to resist the urge to label and categorize when it is fundamentally connected to reasoning? I like that you reference digestion in your question. I make an effort to tune into non-verbal responses. Sensations are not trivial.

Everything is about cutting. Essentially the cutting begins when I lift my camera to record. Something is inevitably cut out of the frame. And when I view an image my eye cuts a trail through that two-dimensional plane.

I make pictures of things and then I make things from my prints by physically cutting into my images with scissors and knives. For me collage is a provocative collision between destruction and construction.

The shapes I generate are suggestive and the bits of recognizable forms agitate associations. Chains of complicated interactions shift from subtle to extreme throughout the topography of my spliced and pieced together pieces.

Our image saturated culture trains us well to simultaneously interpret available information while internally making connections with collections of experiences. A flat image is never really as static as it may appear to be.

There seems to be a relationship between these “knots” and the human brain (both are complicated, endlessly confused and full of personal memories), can you discuss this and what it means to both the making of the work and the function of it?

The act of destroying a complete image in the process of inventing a new form seems analogous to the way that we process new information. We think we understand something but that thing and our relationship to it continues to transform.

I make marks with the way that I cut into photographs. I use fragments of recorded information to draw connections in and out and through different environments in a manner that I imagine information might travel through the body.

In the question you reference the kinds of experiences I find most compelling – complicated, endlessly confusing and full of personal memories…though I would substitute something like ‘charge’ for ‘memory’ because I favor emotions over memories.

I think of these idiosyncratic patterns that I build as metaphors for the chaotic undulations of emotions. Rhythms and patterns suggest an internal logic that has the ability to provide order for intense experiences beyond out conscious control.

I am hard wired to disrupt the surface of photographs, barging through the illusion. An unconscious fear of the void may drive me to fill openings with convoluted order. I am challenged by the provocative nature of the push and pull between recognition and abstraction.

In these “knots”, how much is arbitrary and how much is full of purpose? Does it matter?

I create turbulent environments with veiled subjects that are torn apart and turned upside down. That may sound overly dramatic but my intention is to suggest how in the making I travel through illusionistic planes to create tangles, knots and webs of psychological fabric. Material presents itself and is subverted into malleable forms. Chance informs reason.

Can you talk about the direction of the viewer’s eye and your direct command of it with cutting into photographs?

For me, attention is drawn to the contrast between the seemingly fixed frames of photographic borders and the frenzied expression in the mark making and the weaving together of the collage elements. This ecstatic energy embellishes the experience of recognition.

My tangled inventions overlap and intersect, upending expectations of foreground, background, object, subject, and motion. The physicality of these layered works activates opportunities for compelling paths of visual explorations through the fabric of the collages and taps into our intuitive abilities to entertain multiple narratives.

Are you reorganizing your own memories with this work? Are these alternative story lines?

I suppose I am reorganizing memories and rewriting experience as we often do with our recollections.

What I am actually looking at is always being rearranged.

The iterations of available fictions in photographic representation have been deliberately complicated and in turn moderate the speed of recognition. I actively experiment with the physicality of photographic materials while simultaneously playing with the observations and distortions photographs provide.

Here is another storyline. For years I ignored snaps that I compulsively made outside of my studio. Why do certain moments feel quintessentially photographic and hard for photographers to resist? I react with my camera (like many) to the quality of light, color, texture, and pattern found in the world. Now I am allowing myself to use my photographs that any photographer might take. The world is engulfed in images. I fight to feel uninhibited by the way that I contribute to this image glut.

Is there truth in the photographs you are using? Do you have any grasp on it?

Truth is subjective, slippery and overvalued!

There are always alternative storylines!

I think about what is

tangible,

recognizable,

knowable,

or understood

in the vast gulf between

the event,

the observation of the event,

the many conflicting points of view,

and the potential representations of that event.

I think about

who is in front of the camera,

who is behind the camera,

what is in the frame,

what might be just outside of the shot,

or the information that could be uncovered behind photographs.

I think about the power and influence wielded in the act of describing something.

Ask yourself a question and respond.

Do you feel vulnerable?

Yes.

http://www.aimeebeaubien.com/

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