Sarah Hobbs holds a MFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, Athens. She lives and works in Atlanta. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Sir Elton John Collection, among others. Hobbs’ work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art as well as Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work has been included in several group shows across the country. Her first monograph, Small Problems in Living, was published in 2012.
Statement
Constructing psychological space is the driving force behind my work. I examine concepts that involve the human psyche: neuroses and compulsions that challenge us all, questioning the idea of normal. Illustrating our attempts to cope with and manage our issues ourselves, the work reveals the inevitable pitfalls these efforts create. Further, the work delves into the feeling of domestic ennui and discontent, and a feeling of directionless energy that leads the mind on a path that diverges from the norm: a small, seemingly insignificant thought played out to the point of obsession.
Installations are created in domestic or other private spaces, representing a thought process or a subconscious drive. Everyday objects serve as psychological signifiers. Singly, these materials are mundane, but collected and arranged to excess, they take on a heavier meaning. The photographs and site-specific installations represent the behavioral residue left by compulsions, channeled in a direction that led the mind on a tangential path – a small, insignificant thought physically taken to the extreme. I am fascinated by the ways in which we arrange our living spaces through our neuroses. Does the space we have created assuage or exacerbate our inner conflicts? The tension between power and vulnerability in terms of what motivates us as well as what drives our behavior is an important theme in the work as well. There is a delicate balance between how we want to be perceived and how much we can really handle mentally.
According to Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, our interior spaces carry psychological weight and the things with which we fill the space can be metaphors for our lives - our outward lives and our inner lives. "We live fixations" (direct quotation from Bachelard). Our fixations are our foibles, our neuroses, and little fears that can tend to either upset our lives or run our lives. They can fill or take over our physical space as well as our mental space, maybe not on a daily basis, but certainly on a periodic basis. We live our fixations even when we are consciously trying to overcome them.