Atlanta-based photographer Sarah Hobbs is having a show of her work at the Silver Eye Center for Photography, at 1015 East Carson Street, in Pittsburgh, PA 15203, up now through March 12th, 2011.
This show consists of fifteen large-scale images from Hobbs' Out of Mind portfolio, a body of work in which Hobbs explores the boundary markers, the similarities and differences, between what constitutes the normal and abnormal in human thought and behavior.
These images are all based on carefully constructed sets in which seemingly familiar domestic settings turn out to be odd or askew in ways obvious, subtle, and sometimes disturbing. Each image brings to our attention contradictory aspects of human nature in which phobias, obsessions, or other neurotic states take on visual form. Hobbs' work heightens our sense that photography is a performative as well as a documentary practice, showing us a world that is at once ordinary and theatrical, real and fictional, outside as well as inside of us.
Hobbs was born in Lynchburg, Virginia and studied at the University of Georgia, where she received her MFA in photography in 2000. She has showed her work in New York and Chicago as well as across the South. Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Sir Elton John Collection; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.
Here's more about Sarah Hobbs. She is definitely a Southern Photographer We Watch Out For.