NEW YORK, NY.- Tama Hochbaum's mother came of age in the 1930s during the Golden Age of the Silver Screen. As a young woman, one of her favorite pastimes was going to the movies. During the last years of her life as she suffered from increasingly poor health with the onset of Alzheimer's, she found great comfort in watching re-broadcasts of the movies of her youth. Hochbaum cared for her mother long distance with daily phone calls and visits as often as she could. Mother and daughter stayed connected by watching movies simultaneously on The Turner Classic Movies station that by serendipity was on Channel 67 in both their neighborhoods--Hochbaum's in North Carolina, her mother's in New York.

After her mother passed away in February 2012, Hochbaum conceived the idea for Silver Screen (Daylight, May 2015) as a loving tribute to her mother and the films and Hollywood legends that gave her such joy. She describes the project as "an act of both love and loss, a struggle to hold on to memory and an understanding of the futility of such a struggle, a willingness to let memory fade."

Over a period of two years, Hochbaum immersed herself in the movies that her mother loved and became entranced. Using her iPhone, she grabbed screenshots off her television running the old classic movies. Her images of her shimmering subjects are not freeze frames. They are caught in real time as the movie is playing, memorializing them in tight close-up leading up to a dramatic moment such as a highly stylized screen kiss. The images captured from her home TV screen emit a haunting luminosity and an ethereal quality that is magical and mesmerizing. Hochbaum moves in close to the screen to make her shots, distorting the images, accentuating and exaggerating the actress's eyes, cheekbones, mouth, and face in pixelated, fractured detail.

Silver Screen captures scenes from such classic cinema as Camille starring Greta Garbo (her mother's favorite movie), Jezebel featuring Bette Davis (which Hochbaum remembers watching with her mother), Lauren Bacall in Key Largo, Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, and Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. The series takes the form of both single images and grids of contiguous shots of unfolding scenes. In a companion series, Hochbaum captures the dancers of the Silver Screen. An exhibition of the dancers series entitled Silver Screen: Dancers is currently on view at the George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco through March 21, 2015.

In his review of the show, San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker writes: "Hochbaum drills through time and media, looking back decades through digital files and cathode-ray video to celluloid in a metaphor for cultural memory entwining personal history that is startlingly powerful ..."

Hochbaum traces the trajectory of her mother's legacy using stacked technologies: celluloid transmitted via broadcast and rendered digitally, the silver screen of her mother's youth, the TV screen of Hochbaum's own coming-of-age, and the ubiquitous iPhone screen of her daughter's generation. In Silver Screen, Hochbaum reverently explores memory, attachment and loss with images that are simple, iconic and strangely current.

Tama Hochbaum is an artist/photographer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 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 New York. She worked as a painter for 20 years before turning to photography. She has exhibited extensively in the Triangle, including an exhibition entitled Silver Screen in July and August of 2014 at the Daylight Project Space in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Daylight Books will publish her book of the same name, Silver Screen, in the spring of 2015.

Hochbaum's work was included at the Miami/Basel Art Fair in December of 2014 and 2012 and at the PhotoLA fair in January of 2014, all with George Lawson Gallery. She was the juror's choice for the Regarding Beauty exhibition at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Kathleen Clark, juror, in March of 2015. Hochbaum is represented by George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco who has exhibited her work five times, most recently, Silver Screen: Dancers on view through March 21, 2015. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the William Benton Museum of Art in Storrs, Connecticut.