Tama Hochbaum

Tama Hochbaum is an artist/photographer living in Chapel Hill. 

Originally from New York, she received her BA from Brandeis University in Fine Arts and was awarded upon graduation a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship to study printmaking at Atelier 17 in Paris. She received her MFA in Painting from Queens College in NYC. She worked as a painter for 20 years before turning to photography.

Tama Hochbaum is represented by George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco.

In the summer of 2018 an exhibition of her work, entitled Over/Time: Imaging Landscape, will be installed at CAM Raleigh, The Contemporary Art Museum.

From February through May of 2018 her work was included as part of the TRIBE exhibition at the Fox Talbot Museum in Wiltshire England.

Six large installations of her photo-compositions, based on the photographs from her monograph, SILVER SCREEN, published by Daylight Books in the spring of 2015, have been on exhibit at University Place in Chapel Hill since October of of that year.

She has had 5 solo exhibitions of her work at George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco and Los Angeles and was included in 2 group exhibitions in the gallery in its new location in Mill Valley, CA. Her work was included at the Miami/Basel Art Fair in December of 2014 and 2012 and was included at the PhotoLA fair in January of 2014 and 2019, all with George Lawson Gallery.

Hochbaum was chosen as a finalist in the prestigious Critical Mass/PhotoLucida competition in the fall of 2015 and 2018.

A large collaborative work with her husband, the composer Allen Anderson, was presented as part of World Water Day in March of 2013 at the FedEx Global Education Center on UNC's Chapel Hill Campus as well as a screening of their collaborative piece, Graffito, at Memorial Hall at UNC in 2011.

Her work is included in the collections of both the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the William Benton Museum in Storrs Connecticut, and soon to be a part of The Gregg Museum at North Carolina State University.

From my earliest days as an artist I have been interested in making work about the passage of time. The piece I consider to be my first work as an adult artist is an etching, a composite family portrait/landscape, a work I produced in college. In it, I drew from two photographs, one of my grandparents and one of my toddler father. There is a stage set of sorts, columns and a backdrop, in the studio portrait taken of my grandparents at the turn of the 20th century in Warsaw. There is a checkerboard floor in the portrait of my father as a young boy, taken in New York where the family had fled, escaping the pogroms and the Russian army. And there is a New England interior and landscape - the window sill of my dorm room, the winter and spring, depicted simultaneously, outside that window sill. There is a melding of locations, and even eras and continents in a single picture plane. Time passes from inch to inch in this etching, from corner to corner, from foreground to back. I have continued over the years to be interested in this depiction of time passing, through my years as a printmaker and then as a painter, and now as an artist with a camera.

In all of the portfolios that I have worked on over the last 4 or 5 years, I have continued this exploration. In SILVER SCREEN, I photographed, with my iPhone, the TV broadcasting the movies that my mother loved. I captured fleeting moments on a small screen, images harkening back to, and depicting the stars of, the 20s, 30s and 40s. This portfolio consisted of both single images and images in grid form, a structure that fairly insists one notices the passage of time - one’s eye moves from frame to frame, making the viewer aware of the process of seeing and the time it takes to see. But even with the single images, there are implications of the multiple, the many, the sequence. In their compression of a face, by shooting the TV at an oblique angle, in the falling in and out of focus, the ghosting that sometimes happens as the shot moves, I am still implying that notion that obsesses me. This overriding theme continues through the Silver Screen: Dancers portfolio as well as through the Legacy portfolio that follow SILVER SCREEN and precede my current work.

As I have moved into making polyptychs in various shapes, I have continued to be concerned with this same notion, the desire to manifest in a concrete way, to make palpable this interest, this obsession with time passing. The modular makeup of these pieces enhances that sense of watching oneself see, watching the seconds pass. I spoke to the way this happens in my narrative, the way the empty center of the Bi Squares encourages the viewer to meditate on both what has come before and what might come in future. The Glandon Drive lintel seems to present a fork in the road, a choice, and a portal you are invited to pass through, to meander and contemplate what might be. The crosses give the viewer a structure to peruse, up and down, left and right, the here and now of the vertical and the past moving to the future of the span of the horizontal.

I have continued working with this notion of lapsed time in the Over/Time: Imaging Landscape portfolio. Using a modular structure, I am building up these current landscape images in a grid form. I begin with multiple separate images and stack them in rows and columns. I then return to the spot over and over and capture the spaces where the initial images had joined. While in my somewhat recent work I was uninterested in a seamless final image, working in fact to draw one’s attention to the mismatched points of juncture, I am tending more towards that seamlessness in this portfolio by a partial erasure, in Photoshop, of the areas of joining, integrating the layers, the interstices, blending the edges, but always leaving a hint, a fog of mystery at the perimeter of the individual frame. a reminder that this is no window we are looking through; this is the act of seeing itself.