Client: Museum of Arts and Design

Overview

“Pieceable Kingdom”, 2018 installation for Museum of Arts and Design, 540 square feet (18 x 30 x 12 feet), Vinyl flooring (stock ocean images imported from China and floor tiles bought in New York dollar stores), plastic holiday tablecloths, plastic bags, oil and acrylic paint, wood, plaster.

Goals

In Pieceable Kingdom, MAD’s Spring 2017 Van Lier Fello­w Camille Hoffman presents new mixed-media artworks that offer meditations on Manifest Destiny and its latent representation in the romantic American landscape. For her Fellow Focus exhibition, Hoffman reflects on how histories of race, gender, and power are often embedded within influential American landscape paintings of the nineteenth century through their depictions of light, nature, the frontier, and borders.

Process

This installation explores the interconnectedness of the artist's personal identity with American colonialism, environmental policy, and contemporary pop culture. Using materials collected from her everyday life, including holiday-themed tablecloths, discarded medical records, nature calendars, plastic bags, and paint, she crafts imaginary landscapes that are grounded in accumulation, personal narrative, and historical critique. Her paintings are layered geographies, in which these fragments of cultural objects are chromatically twisted and blended into complex wholes.