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Annie Hobbs An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com
Annie Hobbs' photography accomplishes an effective exploration about the possibilities of film to convey emotions she draws from reality and dream-like atmosphere into a coherent harmony. Her work rejects a conventional classification and captures the ephemeral quality of experience to condense it on both conscious and unconscious levels. Hobbs' evocative and direct approach urges the viewer to investigate about the relationship between reality and the way we perceive it. One of the most convincing aspects of her practice is the way she walks us into a liminal area in which memory and perceptual processes find an unexpected point of convergenceto. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Annie and a warm welcome to ARTiculAction. To start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and you hold a BFA in Photography, that you received from the Columbia College, Chicago: how does this experience impacted on the way you relate to art making? And in particular, how does the relationship between your cultural substratum and
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your current life in Chile inform the way you conceive your works?
Hi, and thank you for inviting me to participate in your magazine. To answer your first question, the photography department at Columbia College Chicago definitely shaped me into the artist I am now. The faculty there is solid, and when I was in school, the analog facilities were amazing, so I consider myself very lucky to have been a part of it all. I was constantly inspired by faculty, friends and peers, and the wealth of knowledge about art in general that I was gaining through just being there. I learned how to form and execute ideas and projects, as well as the technical aspects of artmaking. My process is a direct descendent from my education. Living abroad has only affected my work in that I live here now. I guess my point of view is now as an outsider, and I use my camera to investigate the culture a bit more than I did in the US, but I am still documenting my life, just like I did before. Now it’s just with more of a sense of wonder. We would suggest to our reader to visit http://anniehobbsphotography.com in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production: your work is marked with a stimulating combination between figurative approach and an unconventional kind of abstraction, capable of walking the viewers into a