CAMILLE HOFFMAN
MOTHERLANDS
PRESS PREVIEW
August 13–26, 2022
OPENING RECEPTION WITH THE ARTIST
Friday, August 26, 5-7pm
(August 2022) Using materials such as plastic bags and mass-produced vinyl landscapes, Queens-based artist Camille Hoffman transmutes commercial and overly romanticized American landscapes into personally sacred and site-specific experiences. Motherlands, Hoffman’s premiere solo show at form & concept, is an immersive installation incorporating recent mixed-media paintings, floor coverings and personal artifacts and memorabilia, situated as a womb-like entry within the gallery’s atrium. Visitors are invited to enter and reflect on their own connection to land and place on August 26 through December 23, and are welcome to join the artist and her mother, fellow form & concept artist Melinda Hoffman, at the opening reception on Friday, August 26, 5-7pm.
Drawing from extensive historical research and her everyday material reality, as well as meaningful exchanges with living wisdom keepers from her community, Hoffman’s installations are a spatial rethreading of misplaced personal and collective histories. In Motherlands, Hoffman utilizes a paint palette of sienna, adobe, sandstone and the electric bright blue of Southwestern skies alongside iconic NYC debris (like “Thank You, Thank You, Thank You” plastic bags). In addition to photography of New Mexico, where Hoffman spent much of her formative years as a guest on Northern and Southern Tewa land, the artist incorporates stock photography of tropical waves and fauna from the Philippines, her ancestral home.
“While my work deals with belonging and ancestry and connecting back to the land,” says Hoffman, “I’m also contending with the shifting identities of those who move between multiple lands. These mass-produced images and materials depict the majestic, pristine space we’ve romanticized, and also how we consume and commodify this land of supposed opportunity and manifest destiny. I question the deeper kind of debris of this history as a result of centuries of violence, erasure of Indigenous people and the kind of colonial legacy that extends from and far beyond the continental U.S.”
And yet, in Motherlands, viewers also witness creation: a deeply personal self-portrait by R. Melinda Hoffman while pregnant with the artist appears within what Hoffman describes as “the womb” of the installation. This poignant imagery completes the cycle of Camille’s ultimate thematic striation: life, ancestry and sacredness are inextricable. “Legacy lives on through us,” continues Hoffman. “There’s space within our own bodies for the contradictions of life, dreams and reality. That’s why I have this interest in not just using these materials, but transforming them to create a space that is hyper-specific and also sacred, activated by the hand and human presence. Whoever is visiting, whoever is in this space, they are invited to imbue it with meaning and their own subjective experience of sacredness.”
Camille Hoffman (b. 1987, Chicago, IL) uses materials collected from childhood and her everyday life to craft imaginary landscapes that are grounded in accumulation, personal narrative and historical critique on the romanticized American landscape. Taking inspiration from the Philippine weaving and storytelling traditions of her ancestors, along with traditional landscape painting techniques from her academic training, she interweaves image with refuse in order to reveal seamless yet textured transcultural contradictions.
Hoffman earned an MFA from Yale University (2015), a BFA from California College of the Arts (2009), and was a recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting from Yale University, a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, and the Van Lier Fellowship from the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and in Europe, and has been featured in publications including The Los Angeles Times, Art in America and The New Yorker. Hoffman has also worked for 16 years as an arts educator and community organizer in Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Haven and New York City. She currently lives and works in New York and teaches at The Cooper Union and Yale University.
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