Photography Exhibition Tama Hochbaum, Bi: Recent Photographs

In the middle room we present 4 representative images from Chapel Hill-based photographer Tama Hochbaum’s ongoing series, Bi. The name refers to a form of neolithic Chinese bas relief, Jade discs carved with a hole in the middle, often discovered as funerary objects in tombs and thought to represent heaven. Hochbaum is photographing multiple angles from a fixed position, printing directly on aluminum, and reassembling the images as polyptychs with an empty center. Hochbaum’s practices in a quasi-cubist mode, using the medium biographically, always reaching back to pull her ongoing narrative into one, integrated story, the loop of her earliest memories melding with her most recent experiences.

Originally from New York, Hochbaum worked as a painter for 20 years before turning to photography and many of the formal concerns of paint persist in her approach to photographic media. She received her BA from Brandeis University and her MFA from Queens College, studying printmaking in the interim at Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris under a Thomas J Watson Foundation Fellowship. She has had solo shows in Boston, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the William Benton Museum in Storrs, Connecticut. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo at the Media Lab at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is her 6th solo with the gallery.

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