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Please forward information about "The Camoufleurs" -
Installation by Etienne Benson, Dan Hisel and Hanna Rose Shell. Artist
Statement and installation description below. For travel directions and
details, see attached flyer and press release.<br>
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<font face="Courier, Courier" size=4><b>OVERVIEW OF THE
CAMOUFLEURS</b><i>, site-specific environmental art installation.
Camouflage</i> is a strategy of systematic dissimulation or imitation for
the purposes of concealment effected through mimicry of natural, animal,
vegetable or mineral forms. It emerged as a potent response to
photography’s practical and theoretical impacts on natural science,
visual art and the military in the twentieth century. It is about hiding
(both oneself and one’s
world)</font>
<a href="file:///applewebdata/::B350E1AA-5CB1-4C47-994B-CD5C5DDAB069#_msocom_1">
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</a></font><font face="Courier, Courier" size=4>from ground and air, land
and sea, self and other. For their project on Bumpkin Island in Boston
Harbor (August 29-September 1) <i>The Camoufleurs </i>(Etienne Benson,
Dan Hisel, Hanna Rose Shell) interweave three strands of camouflage
tactics into a networked installation across Bumpkin Island in Boston
Harbor. <i>Erased Shadow Stucture</i>, <i>Surveillance in the Wild</i>
& <i>The Creeping</i>.<br>
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<font face="Courier, Courier" size=4>1. <b><i>ERASED SHADOW STRUCTURE
</i></b>During World War Two threats of aerial bombardment triggered
large-scale civilian and industrial camouflage efforts up and down the
coastline. High altitude aerial reconnaissance planes were flying over
suspected target areas and taking photographs of the ground at different
times of the day in order to compare the shadows in one image, to shadows
in the other. Telltale shadows of key installations had to be
avoided; one primary strategy was through the construction of a false
geometry of wires and camo nets over and around these buildings, in order
to create forms to obscure and eliminate the building’s hard shadows.
Such aerial camouflage techniques inspire "Erased Shadow
Structures," tracings of solar geometries in and around Bumpkin
Island. <br>
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<font face="Courier, Courier" size=4>2. <b><i>SURVEILLANCE IN THE
WILD</font><font face="Helvetica, Helvetica" size=4>
</i></b></font><font face="Courier, Courier" size=4>Wildlife biologists
have increasingly come to rely on automatic cameras to study their often
elusive and well-camouflaged subjects, drawing on the kinds of aerial
surveillance apparatuses with which "Erased Shadow Structures"
is in dialog. How might such surveillance change our experience of parks
and other "natural" spaces? Does the meaning of a picnic, a
walk in the woods or the frontier experience evoked by the term
"homesteading" depend on whether we are seen or unseen,
recorded or unrecorded, certain or uncertain that we are being
watched? "Surveillance in the Wild" deploys automatic
cameras around Bumpkin Island-some in plain sight others hidden, like the
animals and camoufleurs they aim to detect, by the plentiful Oriental
Bittersweet.<br>
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<font face="Courier, Courier" size=4>3. <b><i>THE CREEPING: (CAMOUFLAGE
WEED)</font><font face="Helvetica, Helvetica" size=4>
</i></b></font><font face="Courier, Courier" size=4>Oriental Bittersweet
(<i>Celastrus orbiculatus)</i> is an invasive species, a woody, deciduous
fast-creeping vine that coats and cloaks the environment of Bumpkin
Island. In "The Creeping," artists and visitors collaborate to
transform Oriental Bittersweet into a material for the concealment of
human bodies and transport pathways. Inspired by history and
environment, they turn the plentiful invasive species into a material of
strategic and artistic homesteading practice. The camoufleurs, like their
materials, and the island environments they seek to inhabit, come to be
anywhere and nowhere. A layer of disruptive patterning crawls over an
island pockmarked by history.<br>
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