Sarah Hobbs

Sarah Hobbs (born 1970) is an artist. Hobbs is from Lynchburg, Virginia. She lives and works in Atlanta.

Sarah Hobbs
Born1970
Lynchburg, Virginia
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Georgia
Known forphotography
Websitesarahhobbs.net

Career

Hobbs builds psychological, room-scale still lives which engage "apprehension, frustration, confusion, indecision—emotions that trouble the soul" and photographs them as large format color images.[1][2] Her photos, including those in "Small Problems in Living" (1999-2004), are taken on a 4x5 camera.[3] These scenes are set up in Hobb's home or the homes of close friends; they are made to be dreamlike.[4] Across her career, her photographs and installations are about "perfectionism and its cousins, obsessiveness and overcompensation."[5] Hobbs' interest in human mania has spilled out from just photographs of staged scenes and into gallery installations, which suggest craft tipping over into mania and obsession.[6] Broadly, her work also engages the psycho-social, alienation, irrational fears, little neurosis, and common bonds over shared problems.[3]

"Sarah Hobbs's work explores and gives form to various human behaviors and compulsions. She carefully stages and photographs scenes that are meant to embody phobias, neuroses, and obsessions. Her intricate tableaus are simultaneously profound and witty, reflecting Hobbs's understanding of human psychology." - Katherine A. Bussard, Assistant Curator of Photography at The Art Institute of Chicago.[7]

In 2011 Hobbs received an Artadia Award.[8] In 2003 she was a finalist for the Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award.[9] Her work has been exhibited in notable public collections including at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.[10] Her work has been traveling since 1998.[10]

In 2011, her book Small Problems in Living was published; the book compiles three photographic series.[11] In this project, "apparently familiar and harmless scenes become threatening or overwhelming," like way that a familiar scene could be "perceived by someone suffering from paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias or neurosis."[12] Her work is featured in The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography (2019) where it is reviewed as "provoking contemplation, inviting [viewers] to see spaces differently," and her contemporaries in fabricated, place-based constructed photography are listed as Noémie Goudal and Oh Soon-Hwa.[13]Vitamin PH (2006), another book featuring Hobbs' photographs, likens her images to Woody Allen's post-modern comic manifesto, "I can't express anger. I just grow a tumor instead."[3]

Education

Hobbs received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history from the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia in 1992 and her Master of Fine Arts degree in photography in 2000, also from the University of Georgia.[9]

Selected exhibitions [14]
  • 2020 Photography and Narrative, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
  • 2019 Louder Than Words, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia
  • 2019 Twilight Living, Hathaway Contemporary Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia (solo)
  • 2017 Sarah Hobbs: Psychological Traces, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis, Indiana (solo)
  • 2017 Handful of Dust, site-specific installation in collaboration with Hannah Israel, Whitespec, Atlanta, Georgia
  • 2016 What is Near: Reflections on Home, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
  • 2016 Somewhere in the Balance, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, Texas
  • 2016 Interior States, Pinnacle Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia (solo)
  • 2015 ArtLab: Sarah Hobbs: It Started as an Experiment, Seaboard Studios, Columbus State University, Columbus, Georgia (solo)
  • 2015 Flight in Place (an installation in the home of writer Carson McCullers), Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Columbus, Georgia (artist-in-residence) (solo)
  • 2013 Looking Forward: Gifts of Contemporary Art from the Patricia A. Bell Collection, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey
  • 2012 CRITICAL MASS 2011 - Contents: Love, Anxiety, Happiness and Everything Else, Photo Center NW, Seattle, Washington; Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, Oregon; and Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco, California
  • 2011 Out of Mind, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (solo)
  • 2009 Slightly Unbalanced: Sophie Calle, Mike Kelly, Bruce Nauman, Sarah Hobbs, et al. Independent Curators International, New York, New York (traveling exhibition)
  • 2007 On the Scene: Kota Ezawa, Sarah Hobbs, Angela Strassheim, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

References
  1. Dimling Cochran, Rebecca (2005). "Sarah Hobbs at the Knoxville Museum of Art". Art in America. Vol. 93, no. 9.
  2. "Sarah Hobbs exhibition: 'Interior States' | SCAD.edu". SCAD.edu. Retrieved 2017-02-21.
  3. Vitamin Ph: new perspectives in photography. London; New York, NY: Phaidon. 2010-01-01. ISBN 9780714856421. OCLC 795174663.
  4. Hapgood, Susan (2008). Slightly Unbalanced. Independent Curators International. p. 56. ISBN 978-0-916365-78-3.
  5. Harry, Lou (January 16, 2017). "Obsession permeates artist Sarah Hobbs' distressing habitats". Indianapolis Business Journal.
  6. Feaster, Felicia (30 March 2021). "2 photographers, 2 effects in uneven Chastain show: Sarah Hobbs, Susie Winton team for engaging project". Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
  7. "Sarah Hobbs: Modern Angst". Sumter County Gallery of Art. Archived from the original on 9 September 2013. Retrieved 2017-02-21.
  8. "Sarah Hobbs". Artadia. 2 March 2016. Retrieved 2019-06-11.
  9. "Sarah Hobbs Biography". ArtNet. Retrieved 24 June 2021.
  10. "Sarah Hobbs". Yossi Milo Gallery. Retrieved 2017-02-21.
  11. Hobbs, Sarah (2011). Sarah Hobbs: Small Problems in Living. Distributed Art Pub Incorporated. ISBN 978-88-8158-831-2.
  12. Castro Diaz, Maribel (Winter 2019). "Visual Storytelling in Hypermodernity: The Transformative Construction of Symbolic Realities Through Staged Photography". Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics. (Vol. 42, Issue 3) – via Gale Academic Onefile.
  13. The Focal Press companion to the constructed image in contemporary photography. Anne Leighton Massoni, Marni Shindelman. New York, NY. 2019. ISBN 978-1-315-64780-7. OCLC 1049150046.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  14. Sarah, Hobbs (2019). "CV" (PDF). Retrieved March 30, 2021.
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