Keyi Zhang: First of all, can you tell us a bit about your experience of teaching at SAIC. How do you feel about the environment, your coworkers, and your students?

 

Aimee Beaubien: I love the opportunity to teach at the school. I was working in commercial photography and the chair of the photography (department) at the time invited me to teach one class, so I kept working full time at this commercial job and taught that one class. I just love the creative freedom that there is in the classroom, and I love being around artists who are making things and trying to understand why they are making the things they are making. Therefore, I asked for more classes. Then more classes turned into more classes, which turned into more classes, and then finally I decided to quit the full-time job (in commercial photography) and try as hard as I could to make a living at teaching part-time. And then years and years and years later, 17 years later, that turned into a full-time position, and the whole reason why I work so hard at that is that I found the School of the Art Institute to be so inspiring. It is surrounded by so many talented people from students to faculties to staff, and alumni are all around the world, and I can go anywhere and meet people that are somehow connected to the school. It’s just really exciting to see people‘s production evolve over years. I feel like there are so many students that have turned into friends, that have these ongoing relationships. So it’s really exciting to kind of just see everything kind of spinning out of this institution and I am very grateful that it’s a source of inspiration for my personal work too.

 

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Keyi Zhang: So have you brought part of your teaching experience into your work?

 

Aimee Beaubien: I am always inspired by students and in terms that I am trying to inspire them, so anything that I’m excited about that I encounter in the world, I try to find ways to make it relevant within the classroom. We just started school again, and over the summer I was listening to George Thunders talk about the class that he teaches in the MFA Writing program in Art Therapy, and he is describing this MFA seminar he taught really getting into the details about things that were happening in the classroom and then things that were happening in his own creative process, like different ways of writing and how to be creative within just composing a sentence. And I thought that was something I found out, and I brought it into the classroom and played a clip of it to my students. I was just delighted that they found it inspiring too. So, I am always testing things, you know, like if I think this is interesting, how can I make it interesting for my fellow students, and I see all these students in college as artists and look forward to seeing where the works take them.

 

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Keyi Zhang: In your practice, have you ever experienced the situation that you want to experiment with a new medium?

 

Aimee Beaubien: Me? Personally? I am always experimenting with new mediums! So, this is new, this just start during the pandemic, and I started this huge series of paper matches sculptures, and then putting photographs on them, and painting and drawing on these sculptures. But I am always experimenting with new material and figuring out ways to bend photographs. You know Photographs are so flexible. What ways can I push photographs that are new to me, that introduce new ways of thinking about the way the world appears in photographs.

 

Keyi Zhang: In your making process, have you ever experienced the situation, for example, you feel that a photo might not be the best medium to interpret your idea, but sculpture or the combination of two mediums?

 

Aimee Beaubien: Yeah, I think that’s one of the reasons why I moved into installation. I am always making these complicated collages and every time I photograph the collages (they) just look really flat like they are being made on a computer. So, then I kept thinking how can I make them feel more like an object. So, I first started by just pushing them off the wall and then photographed them but they still looked flat. And I just thought ok, how can I make a photograph stand out on its own? So, I just keep asking myself what if I did this, what if I did that. It's just challenging myself all the time and taking risks and trying to figure out where I can take a photograph where I’ve never been before.

 

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Keyi Zhang: During your making process, have you ever been influenced by others from different fields?

Aimee Beaubien: Always! Thanks for your question, always. I sit in the studio, and I make things, but while I’m making things, I’m listening to different staff; so last summer, I listened to this Book, three times, and it was like 21 hours each time. But It's such a great book, it’s a novel by Richard Powell. It’s about trees and all these overlapping stories about trees. And I thought very inspired by that particular book. I also happen to be collecting a whole bunch of tree branches that have fallen during a storm, and I am also making these leave drawings. So it felt very connected and related to the material I was using in my studio at that time. I think I am always reading and looking at things, and I never limit myself to just only looking at photographers, and I am very inspired by makers of all sorts -- dancers, musicians... you know, just anybody who makes things or thinks about the world in unconventional ways.