Tama Hochbaum

Hochbaum has been interested in making work about the passage of time as she does in a recent portfolio of self-portraits titled "As If A Mirror". In her artist statement about this work she states: Hochbaum's previous body of work consisted of composite photo collages, in black and white and color. In these pieces, she begins with a grid of between 25 and 50 photos set up in columns and rows and works digitally to blend the individual panels to make a whole, a single picture plane. She always leaves a hint of fog at the border between the modules, never making a seamless image, to remind the viewer that this is no window one is looking through, this is the act of seeing itself, over time. Previous to this portfolio, Hochbaum created shaped images, made up of individual panels printed into aluminum. She has used three distinct shapes - the symmetrical cross, the lintel or doorway and the Bi square, the empty square, or the squaring off of the Bi disc shape. She has also produced a series on the Silver Screen. In this series, Hochbaum takes screenshots of classic movies broadcast on TV, warping images of Hollywood starlets (Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo and Lillian Gish among them) before printing the image on aluminum panels. She has published a book with Daylight Books of the same name, SILVER SCREEN. Along with these series, she has created a number of slide shows to music; each contain hundreds of her images. Two of these pieces were commissioned by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One, Graffito, a collaboration with her husband the composer Allen Anderson, was screened in Memorial Hall in February 2011 as part of the North Carolina Digital Arts Festival. Another, return:radius, was screened at the FedEx Global Education Center as part of the Water of Life Festival in the Spring of 2013. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Benton Museum in Storrs, Connecticut, and in the corporate collections of Credit Suisse and Truist Bank.