Aimée Beaubien – Found and Found

Fragments of snapshots dispersed and reordered with links made visible between one another. Aimée Beaubien's photographic sources are mainly private diverging from a strong history of collage traditions appropriating material from popular media. Like an archaeologist she collected images from her family, investigated the past and came across a fantastic artistic heritage:

"My earliest recollection of a collage was on my great-grandmother's refrigerator door. Gertrude Bastien (1896-1982) had cut out a snapshot of her 80-year-old face and light-heartedly taped it to the body of a plus-size model dressed only in control top pantyhose also cut by Gertrude from an advertising environment. I have mined Gertrude Bastien's photographs and her hand written captions. I link her images with my own and weave a network of descriptions inscribed on the backs of her photographs into my titles. Some pieces in this exhibition are comprised of gouache and color pencil on paper joined with cut and collaged vintage photographs. Other forms are built from collections of my own snapshots that have been cut and reassembled in woven clusters."

Aimée Beaubien creates compositions reminiscent of family trees or totems watching over their descendants, with Gertrude Bastien as founding artistic spirit. From the generation of her great-grandmother until her own in the present, moments in time were fixed in black and white photographs, color snapshots and contemporary pictures which now serve as primary sources for the collage works. The pantyhose, pink or violet in color, return in every collage and contrasts the obvious gap between the beauty of youth and the furrows of old age linked in the collages. The coruscating humor of her great-grandmother thus pervades her work. And in the collage technique everything is possible! Aimée Beaubien shows a refreshing exploration of history and family without predictable trappings of melancholia.

AIMÉE BEAUBIEN received her BFA in 1989 and MFA in 1993 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her photo-based collage work has been exhibited in the US, Spain, Germany, Italy and reviewed in publications such as Art In America, Art on Paper, and Art Papers. Born on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, Beaubien moved through many states and landed in Chicago, Illinois where she lives and works.

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