Camouflage, as we know it, was theorized and introduced into the military lexicon upon the research of artists such as Abbott Thayer and Norman Wilkinson prior to World Wars I and II. These attempts to conceal troops from, at first other soldiers on the ground, later morphing into tactical patterns to block visibility of troop movement from the sky and sea, became as useful as they were a symbiotic indicator of the relationship between visibility, safety, and technology. Thayer, a Romantic painter of angels and a naturalist who first published ideas (not to be confused with inventing camouflage) regarding disruptive patterning and concealing coloration in the wild, worked on collages and stitched massive textiles in large groups explicitly for military concealment. The evolution of camouflage began with its own birth as provided by artists.

Camouflage has since then been used symbolically, tactically, and playfully: from myriad militias to high fashion. In In The Weeds: Camouflage and Its Discontents at houseguest gallery, we gaze at artists using camouflage as we traditionally recognize it, actively camouflaging or concealing information, camouflaging for the sake of safely educating the public, and as artists announcing a form of concealment--allowing it to become known and thus visible again. Some of them assess the navigation of social groups as an outsider within that group, and some analyze systems, the visibility (or breakdown) of data, and camouflage itself. 

Artist Information

Image List can be accessed here.

Borealis (Lexington, Kentucky)

Borealis (they/them/beau/bo) co-produces works rooted in the queer art of care. Beau is a trans, disabled social artist and full-spectrum care worker currently based in Lexington, KY. breadbox is part of an ongoing body of work centered around care, commensality, and reproductive freedom. Approximately three-fourths of people who live in the so-called United States agree that people with the capacity to get pregnant should be able to control the means of their menstrual production. Nevertheless, attempts to restrict abortion access rely on fear, surveillance, and elite rule to perpetuate harmful myths, dominate our bodies, and punish our desires. breadbox resists this fear-mongering through the near-universal folk tradition of breaking bread, fostering affirming conditions to promote reproductive autonomy. 

breadbox’s print materials, video, prompt-stenciled foods, and face-to-face interactions avert high tech surveillance through a constellation of access points. Online videos are typically scanned to create automatic transcriptions, produce SEO-boosting metadata, and shadowban creators supporting legal or extralegal access to healthcare; the seemingly innocuous video installed in breadbox carries information about medication abortion through embedded closed captioning that is not bot-readable. Similarly, risographed zines distributed through ‘bread bags’ are resources tailored to the communities that breadbox visits. Live, communal meals linked to these installations have their own magics.

breadbox counters the small group of outspoken extremists who would have us believe that bodily autonomy is a cruel endeavor for people who can get pregnant, trans people, and those who support us. breadbox treats the liveliness sourdough baking (and each other) with responsive, sustained, and tender loving care, inviting us to articulate regionally-specific answers to the question: how do people access abortion care here?

Federica Bruni (Dundee, Scotland)

Federica Bruni has exhibited at artist-run centers, museums, and galleries including: IGCA (Anchorage), Museion (Bolzano), Fondazione Merz (Turin), Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice) and Performance Art Institute (San Francisco). She has been artist-in-residence at Wassaic Project (NY), Fundacion Botin (ES), Via Farini (IT), and Fondazione Spinola Banna (IT). Federica received her MFA in Visual Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice with a honours degree in Sculpture. She is currently a Postgraduate Researcher at the University of Dundee (DJCAD). She lives and works in Dundee, Scotland. 

Through ​sculpture, installation and photography my work questions human psychology and the Other. More recently, I became particularly interested in exploring that sense of ‘temporary disappearance’ which is experienced when a new identity is (provisionally) adopted. Perhaps the first step to change one’s identity is through disguise. There are different ways to do so. Spies and actors, for instance, are masters at hiding in plain sight. They dress, style their hair and act according to their target. They sacrifice their individual tastes and the chance to express their personality through their look. I find the latter aspect particularly intriguing because feeling at ease in what can be seen as someone else’s skin requires a high dose of self-control. To me this attitude appears almost like an enduring performance act. 

This work consists of the photo of a foreign spy printed on a camouflage pattern sand paper. It is part of a series of portraits of informers whose images were taken from the most wanted section of the FBI's website. Informers are masters of hiding in plain sight and therefore they represent a metaphor for the concept of invisibility.

Pap Souleye Fall (Philidelphia, Pennsylvania)

Pap Souleye Fall is a Senegalese-American artist who lives and works in Philadelphia teaching at the University of the arts. He graduated with honors from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia with a degree in interdisciplinary Fine arts with a concentration in sculpture. In 2017 after a residency at WAAW he participated in the Dak’art biennale twice. He is currently working on an African manga called Oblivion Rouge. He has recently completed his MFA at the Yale School of Art Sculpture program. And was recently awarded the Dedalus Fellowship for emerging artists coming out of MFA programs. His work deals with identity, suspended disbelief, and utopian/ dystopian ideas on community.

My work lives in a universe where each piece whether it be through performance, video, sculpture, or installation is not only a continuation but part of an index of worlds for survival in constant change. I work mainly in cardboard and clothes because it represents the world's most excess of common material. The way I reconstitute and manipulate material stays the same but my ideas change and are threaded together through a series of performances or videos that engage historical narratives and transform them into tangible sites. Using the idea of the dead pixel as a physical manifestation of a hole or missing space in a digital realm I use as opportunity or call for the death of progress. The dead pixel as a means of escape, revolt, humor  and disguise. I use green screen and motion capture as conceptual materials of world building to criticize the notion of subjective cultural identity in a globalized world. 

Within speculative fiction and gameplay, world-building describes the components that come together to create a setting that a reader/player may immerse themself within. The idea behind the large peanut sculpture was to create a new space for potential thinking and discovery. It is a utopian ideal, landing within a dystopian scene. The Arachide Arrache follows the long history of peanut farming in Senegal west africa and its collapse, it takes the narrative of that history and transforms it into a site and perhaps theme park to investigate and play. 

Katie Hargrave & Meredith Laura Lynn (Chatanooga, Tennessee & Tallahassee, Florida)

Meredith Laura Lynn and Katie Hargrave are artists and educators who work collaboratively to explore the historic, cultural, and environmental impacts of so-called public land. Their work has been shown at Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta, GA), the Wiregrass Museum of Art (Dothan, AL), Gadsden Museum of Art (Gadsden, AL), Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), Austin Peay State University (Clarksville, TN), House Guest Gallery (Louisville, KY), Granary Arts (Ephraim, UT) and has been published by Walls Divide Press (Memphis, TN). Together they have been artists in residence at Signal Fire (Portland, OR). Lynn and Hargrave have been collaborating since 2018 and continue to maintain independent studio practices. They met at the University of Iowa, where they both earned MFAs. 

Our project-based collaborative practice is grounded in an inquiry of so-called public lands. We use materials such as tents, coolers, and postcards as sculptural bases that we manipulate with photographic imagery. We are drawn to historical landscape photography, environmental literature, and social media images within our studio research, often collapsing many forms and sources within one body of work.

Wealthy, predominately white tourists are encouraged to “explore” so-called public lands through US land use policy and the outdoor industry. The term “explore” is presented as neutral, without acknowledging possible negative impacts of ballooning usage on fragile landscapes rich in cultural relevance. We are wary of “exploration,” and we locate our work in that wariness, as we consider the impact of the outdoor industrial complex through the creation of multi-layered artworks and installations.

Steve Heine (Louisville, Kentucky)

A late bloomer, I graduated from the UK College of Architecture as an older, non-traditional student. Within my artwork, I embrace the ethos of modernist architect Mies van der Rohe—one where “less is more” and “god is in the details”. I've received past support from the Kentucky Arts Council and The Great Meadows Foundation. I live and work in the Clifton neighborhood of Louisville.

The QR code reads "Wuhan virus". One in a series of pieces, I've been thinking about the rise of nationalist ideology in America, “dog whistles” and code, and the mesmeric distortion of language.

Other ideas that interest me in my work are the mindful emergence of the made object; the balance between the enigmatic and the intelligible in visual abstraction; and the in-between space. I’m fascinated by the interaction of light and shadow.

Jordan Hines (Lexington, Kentucky)

Jordan Hines is a designer living in Lexington, Ky. Jordan is a lecturer at the University of Kentucky-School of Architecture. His research and teaching focuses on community partnerships, design-build studios, and pre-college level design education outreach programs. He has led and partnered studios with projects at Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, Lexington Friends Montessori School, University of Kentucky Center for Recycling, the Kentucky Centers School of the Arts and other non-profit organizations. Jordan also teaches architecture courses for non-majors to introduce the role of design in the built environment. Additionally, Jordan is one half of Informal Office which completes creative work at the confluence of narrative and materials.

The “Edges” drawings are digitally composed images that transmit the forgetfulness of memory,  and how our experiences are layered with both past, present, lived, and unlived events. The drawings are not drawings in a conventional sense, in that they are not formed with lines, but rather they are intended to rely on the idea of drawings being formed through the act of layering. The layers of memories are marked with fragments of photography, scanned physical paintings, and smudged with light and color.  The resultant drawings are more akin to a stack of trace paper accumulated on the edge of a desk after a project is finished. This series of drawings forms part of an ongoing body of work which is interested in the things we tend to forget, and the places, materials, and objects that help us reconnect with whatever has been lost.

Claire Krüeger (Louisville, Kentucky)

Claire Krüeger is inspired by analog experiments, love of camp, and melancholic humor. Her work takes the form of videos, photographs, illustration, and zines and she is passionate about community arts, printed matter, and accessible media. She received an MFA in Photography & Film from Virginia Commonwealth University. Claire is based in Louisville, KY.

These are geologic portraits: mineral compositions and rocks that document and witness time, share regional histories through color and formation, and reveal the earthly elements that originate from celestial events outside our planet. These fantastical landscapes both feel, and are, extraterrestrial. 

Conor Murphy (Louisville, Kentucky)

Conor Murphy received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015 from Webster University.  He received his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in May of 2021.  Murphy was the owner and operator the independent art spaces Grease3 in St. Louis and Murphy 500 in Champaign Illinois.  Conor has been making art and working as a sign maker in Louisville, Ky since June of 2021.

My work tends to employ common, everyday objects as tools, used to investigate the in-between complexities of life and time. I aim reexamine the trivial objects and experiences that make up our daily life in order to find an analogy for something deeper.  I like to mix modern phenomena with ancient truths and see what rises to the top.  My art practice does not rely on a specific medium but rather specific messages, including artist jokes, time scales and the human condition.

Jacob Riddle (Pullman, Washington)

Jacob Riddle is an interdisciplinary artist and educator making work that explores and bridges the disconnect between technology and nature. His work is heavily influenced from his past working in construction and other labor industries as well as his roots being raised along the limestone creeks of the Appalachian foothills. Now he is applying the scrappy ingenuity and exploratory experiential learning that was required to survive in those lower-class rural spaces to art, technology, and academia.

DPM∧GAN

Focusing on the uncanny spaces where technology begins feeling organic and where natural life feels technological, I hope to complicate the relationship between the natural world and technology to encourage the protection of nature through technology and show you do not have to reject one to embrace the other. I use artificial intelligence (GAN) that I trained on a dataset of military camouflage from around the world and throughout history to generate new camouflage patterns, which are printed and mounted to dibond. Some of these prints are held with resin-based 3d prints made through a process I call ‘degenerative design’ to create forms that feel both organic and technological. These camouflage prints act as visual targets for an augmented reality filter I created. So when the work is viewed through this AR filter, virtual sculptures are created by 3d scanning mushrooms levitating and rotating in front of the tracker.

Heath Schultz (Chattanooga, Tennessee)

Heath Schultz is a research-based artist and writer. His work critiques ideologies of white supremacy, liberalism, and capitalism. He has published with Minor Compositions, Lateral, Counter-Signals, Parallax, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. His work has been shown at Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS, Oakland, CA; The New Zealand Film Archive, Auckland, New Zealand; Experimental Response Cinema, Austin; and Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND, to name a few. He is an assistant professor of art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. You can view his work at heathschultz.com.

Project Statement for A Capacity for Violence:

Frank Wilderson, borrowing from Fanon, speaks of two zones, categorically opposed, that produce different “species”: the Human and the non-human. It is the policing paradigm that articulates and (re)produces these two racialized zones containing those who magnetize bullets and those who do not. It is the unending repetition of gratuitous police violence that renders it unrepresentable and unanswerable. To speak of “police brutality” would be to mischaracterize the paradigm of police practice as the spectacle of violence, displacing the unending capacity to violence with a series of explainable instances. This violence camouflages itself with its omnipresence, and its unanswerability coheres the (re)making of the white world. 

This is why the “video will fail.” It must, because the unending repetition of anti-Black violence is unrepresentable. The task is to think structurally and categorically at the level of abstraction. The video, then, might be thought of as an artist statement as much as an artwork, setting course for how to think structurally and abstractly about white supremacy and whiteness. 

Allison Spence (Tallahassee, Florida)

Allison Spence is an interdisciplinary artist who creates collage, video, writing, and mixed media objects about patterns of indeterminacy, or states of hybridity, within nature and culture. Her work frequently branches into different fields, such as biology, horror, botany, science fiction, and American art history. She received an MFA at U.C. San Diego, a BFA in Art and a BA in Art History at the University of Florida. Spence’s work has been published in places like The Washington Post and New American Paintings. She was the recipient of the Mid Atlantic Arts Fellowship and the Hamiltonian Fellowship, and her work has been included in the Washingtoniana Collection of District of Columbia’s Public Library. She has exhibited both internationally and nationally, including South Korea, California, and Washington D.C.. Spence is currently living and working in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University. 

There’s a phrase that I use when I’m confronted with something I find too narrow in scope or reductive in definition— “pinning the butterfly.” In other words, to approach something with such taxonomic efficiency, while it may be reassuring or beautiful, is to effectively kill it. What conversation is left to have if we already know what it is or should be? My work often resembles painting or involves paint, but I avoid fitting into the traditional confines of the practice. This could mean it’s partially textile, somewhat-a-photo, or multilayered and three-dimensional. I approach painting the same way that I view our own bodies: both things with weight, form, and widely accepted but stifling anatomies. I’m drawn to corporeal, verbal, or formal bodies that actively confuse our desire to define and delimit. 

I follow my interests in hybridity and its taxonomic precedent, monstrosity, while researching my subject matter. Previous works of mine have focused on such subjects such as the asexually budding horror villain, Tomie, organ transplants, the aspen stand and clonal organism, called Pando, kudzu, and teratomas (“monster tumors”). Whether in subject or form, I approach my work with a collaging mentality. My desire is to challenge viewers to question how we categorize and delimit and the structures within culture that engender these devices. I’d like to create circumstances where previously delineated forms are exposed as inherently malleable, where their identities are in flux, and where our expectations of them are subverted: a body is solid until it isn’t.

Jason Starin (Grand Rapids, Michigan)

Jason Lee Starin has shown in numerous group exhibitions throughout the USA, notably at Katherine E. Nash Gallery, MN., Law Warschaw Gallery, MN., Woodmere Art Museum, PA., Gravity Gallery, MA., American Museum of Ceramic Art, CA., The Center for Craft, Creativity  and Design, NC., GCA Gallery, NYC., Arizona State University Art Museum, Ceramics Research Center, AZ., The Clay Studio, PA., and San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, TX. In 2017, Starin  received an Independence Foundation Fellowship Grant to research his interest in  Geomythology during a two-month stay at the NES Artist Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland. Starin received his MFA in Applied Craft and Design from Pacific Northwest College of Art and  Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2011, and his BFA in Ceramics from Grand Valley State University in 1999. In 1998, he studied abroad at Kingston University, in the United Kingdom. Currently, Starin resides in Grand Rapids, MI., USA. 

It has become more and more difficult to imagine stability in the future. Not even with acute sensitivity can I reach a rational foundation for structural integrity. Reliable past geometries have been nearly decimated. Surface has obfuscated form. Through the development of research, drawings, and sculptures, my works reference geomythology, as well  as sci-fi and fantasy based dystopian landscapes and imagery. My practice is an investigation into fantasy and formal aesthetics with consideration of how those perspectives of the world may relate to privilege and trauma in one's life. Through intuitive making, I am questioning the notion of functionality beyond mere utility. Employing ceramics, discarded objects, and construction materials to make works, my art practice attempts to find connections between craft, escapism, and emotional awareness. 

Max Trumpower (New Albany, Indiana)

Max Trumpower is an artist from Charlotte, North Carolina. Trumpower currently lives and works in New Albany, Indiana. Trumpower graduated with a BFA Studio Art degree in May 2022 with a concentration in painting, with a secondary concentration in ceramics from Appalachian State University. They are attending Indiana University Southeast for their post-baccalaureate in ceramics for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Trumpower has also received the Jody and Peter Petschauer scholarship, where they were fully funded to attend a summer workshop at the Penland School of Crafts. They hope to receive an MFA in ceramics in the near future after completing their post-baccalaureate program.

A large part of the vernacular growing up in a Catholic household surrounds gender, roles within the nuclear family, and tradition.  Parts of these roles are performed, yet some are passed down through intergenerational trauma and become bound to who we are. The conditions that require the correct portrayal of these roles inherently inflict violence, not only onto the self, but to entire communities. As a queer child growing up in this environment, these shoes often felt too large to fill as I began to stumble into adulthood.

My work focuses on the intersection between tradition and queer authenticity. I draw inspiration from Hispanic traditions and its entanglement with the Catholic church that are reflective of my childhood. I am largely influenced by vessels for the altar and the significance of the rituals they play a part of. My work explores the role of authority figures in the church, and how they are often mimicked by authority figures within a domestic setting. Through the utilization of ceramic, I question the permanent, yet fragile, rules that are provided in religious narratives and the inevitable fractures that are created. 

Michael Winters (Louisville, Kentucky)

Michael Winters is an artist living in Louisville, KY. His artwork has been featured in galleries at Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft, Georgetown College, and Intersect Arts (St. Louis). His work has also been featured online on Vice and in print in CIVA’s Seen Journal. He’s director of Sojourn Arts, a program of Sojourn Church Midtown where he has curated exhibits and facilitated artist groups since 2007. 

BARRIERS (photography, 18x12" each, framed) - Parking barriers are usually meant to be visible so that they effectively keep cars off certain areas, but in other areas of life barriers aren't always so obvious. In this series of photographs, a piece of ground is photographed and then printed and folded into the shape of a concrete parking barrier before being placed back into the same landscape and re-photographed.