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Jaimie Warren / 2014

In an amalgam of art history, pop-culture and her prolific imagination, Jaimie Warren’s staged, performative photographs offer a reprieve from the often humorless fine art scene.

The ninth Baum Award was presented to Jaimie Warren in 2014 under the curatorial direction of Chuck Mobley of SF Camerawork.

Warren was born in 1980 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and attended the Kansas City Art Institute where she studied photography and experimented in performance work.

Warren’s photographic works are elaborate forms of self-portraiture, employing makeup, props, costumes, prosthetics, and often a community of collaborators. Warren began her exploration into a unique style of self-portraiture and photography in 2005 while traveling in India and Japan. While abroad, she played with inserting herself into different cultures, dressing like the popular subcultures she encountered, and posing in situations with her new friends and muses.
A natural leader and a truly colorful character, Warren’s creations are reminiscent of grade-school projects turned into parties. Many of her photographs, including those from her series, Totally Looks Like, and, Celebrities as Food & Food’lebrities, are recreations of photoshopped images she culls from the Internet, refashioned without digital enhancements in a determinedly DIY (Do It Yourself) aesthetic. Her work explores the parameters of performance and identity in the context of art history, pop culture, and the Internet. Warren explains that she has taken “complete control of these staged scenes,” and that she is “bringing contemporary culture and humor into the installations, costumes and characters [she’s] creating.” She also prides herself on the number of community members that engage with her to transform her artwork.

In, Art History Series, Warren combines her fascination of pop culture with knowledge of classical art icons, recreating works such as, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, with makeup, props, and a fresh imagination. Often the cast in the recreations are favorite characters and icons in her life, drawing personal significance through the raucous scene of the large community productions, as seen in,

Self-portrait as Nun with some of my Mother’s Favorite Famous People in The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs of the Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece by Fra Angelic0 (2014).

In addition to her work as a photographer, Warren is Co-Creator/Co-Director of the performance art and faux variety show, “Whoop Dee Doo.” Whoop Dee Doo hosts live, free shows and workshops within communities and under-served youth groups, both locally and nationally. Whoop Dee Doo has created commissioned projects for organizations including the Smart Museum, Chicago, IL; the Loyal Gallery, Sweden; the Time-Based Arts Festival/Portalnd Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and The Contemporary, Baltimore, MD.

Since she received the Baum Award in 2014, she has been featured on the Art21 documentary series New York Close Up that chronicles artists in the first decade of their careers. She was also invited to be guest artist for the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) public art course, “I Am a God: Artists, Obsession & the Cult of Celebrity Culture,” and later in 2015 to host MOMA’s first-ever teen lock-in event titled, “Jaimie Warren’s House of Horror.” In 2015, the New York Foundation for the Arts made her a fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts and she received a residency with the Abrons Art Center. As of 2016, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, where her work exhibits at The Hole, Higher Pictures, and American Medium galleries in New York City.

Credits – 2014 Baum Award

Host:	SF Camerawork
Curator:	Chuck Mobley
Jury:	Aspara DiQuinzio, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Phyllis C. Wattis MATRIX Curator at the Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA)
	Chuck Mobley, outgoing Executive Director, SF Camerawork and editor of SF Camerawork Publications
	Heather Snider, incoming Executive Director, SF Camerawork
	Stephanie Syjuco, artist and Assistant Professor in Sculpture, UC Berkeley
	Tirza Latimer, Independent Curator, Chair and Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts

 

Baum Award