Elisabeth Hogeman

Elisabeth Hogeman is a Chicago-based visual artist working in photography, collage, and video to consider conventions of still life. Her practice seeks the slow excavation of domestic subjects through repetition and variation. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago and her BA in Studio Art and English Literature from the University of Virginia. Her projects have been supported by the Versailles Foundation, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago, where she currently works as a part-time lecturer in photography. She has previously exhibited work with the Flak Photo Midwest Print Show, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, EXPO CHICAGO, and at Mana Contemporary and Roots & Culture in Chicago. She is part of an upcoming screening series Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 4, which will tour nationally and premier at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Temporary Arrangement

There is a pleasure in looking at images which cohere to conventions of pictured space—the spaces we see portrayed in still-life paintings or interior design magazines for instance. They facilitate a fantasy and invite us to inhabit them. But these spaces are created only so that they can be rendered. They often depict utilitarian objects and strip them of their utility. They are temporary in nature, a display of the domestic for the purposes of visual consumption, but propose the possibility of an ongoing experience. The images in this ongoing series, Temporary Arrangement, are made through photographing pictures stacked on top of pictures, moving back and forth between the studio (with sun, dust, shadows) and the digital canvas (flat, selectable, scalable). I am interested in the differences between inhabiting physical and virtual space and how this relates to picturing space. For example, the difference between zooming and cropping versus moving closer to an object and reframing it. The differences in interaction and habitation seem relevant as we increasingly live through images.

To view more of Elisabeth Hogeman’s work please visit her website.