Sarah Hobbs’s photographs embrace myriad concepts that coalesce to shape photography’s slippery nature, including installation-based art, domesticity, gender, desire and repulsion, and personal narrative. Hobbs is interested in how mental conditions that we experience might be made visible and visual. Her large-scale photographs, as large as 4 x 5 feet, are images of psychological states of mind made physical. The photographs have titles such as Untitled (Perfectionist), Untitled (Obsessiveness), and Untitled (Memory Loss), to name a few.

To create her monumental photographs Hobbs first creates theatrical installations that she then photographs. By creating simulacra in which she constructs her version of obsession or perfectionism, insomnia or memory loss, Hobbs may examine how we might experience certain compulsions, emotions, or conditions. Her approach is often humorous, but deeply empathetic. She understands how complicated emotional experiences may overwhelm us and by exaggerating their effects, encourages us to dialogue. She further understands that the monumental scale of the photographs more effectively telegraphs the impact of these already-exaggerated psychological and emotional images. Hobbs capitalizes on the deeply conflicting feelings these images may provoke. They are beautifully rendered and thus engaging, while at the same time they may emotionally distance us by reminding us of our own emotional fragilities.

In Untitled (Perfectionist), Hobbs fabricated a room in which a desk is dwarfed by an enormous stack of crumpled papers that threaten to overtake the desk, chair, and the absent person who has seemingly just vacated the room. The mountain of crumpled papers, while formally beautiful, deftly illustrates how we may feel when we just cannot get something right. While we may not actually discard that many drafts, it may feel as if we do. That shared empathy is at the heart of Hobbs’s work. Her work suggests that she too has profoundly experienced all that she has constructed and photographed, making the images even more effective.