Aimée Beaubien
(American, b. 1966; resides in Chicago, IL)
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.
Aimée Beaubien’s work has been included in national and international exhibitions, such as at SF Camerawork, CA (2022); the Chicago Cultural Center (2021); Virus Art Gallery, Rome (2018); Lubeznik Center for the Arts, IN (2018); Bikini Berlin (2016); the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago (2014); galerie obqo, Berlin, Germany (2011); UCRC Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA (2011); Temple Gallery, Philadelphia (1998); and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago (1997), among many others. Beaubien is Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.


Contact, 2019
Contact, 2019
Tangled Sensations, 2018
Hothouse, 2016
Garden Flowers in Color, 2020
Dahlias which came to me, Dahlias I won’t let go, 2021
Plumb and Twining, 2020
Rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils, 2020
Rooted-looping-scrambling-rambling-tangling-twining-tendrils, 2020
Hothouse Picture-Cyclopedia, 2020
Cuttings, 2017
Twist Affix, 2017
Hothouse Cuttings, 2018
Collecting Within, 2016
Collecting Within, 2016
Collected Together, 2019
Unfurl Unfold: the touch of a leaf, the page in a book felt, 2021
Unfurl Unfold: the touch of a leaf, the page in a book felt, 2021