Artist
Sarah Hobbs |
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| Born | 1970
Lynchburg, Virginia |
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| Nationality | American |
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| Alma mater | University of Georgia |
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| Known for | photography |
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| Website | sarahhobbs.net |
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Sarah Hobbs (born 1970) is an artist. Hobbs is from Lynchburg, Virginia. She lives and works in Atlanta.
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]
