Drawing from extensive historical research and her everyday material reality, as well as meaningful exchanges with living wisdom keepers from her community, Queens-based artist and educator Camille Hoffman’s installations are a spatial rethreading of misplaced personal and collective histories. In Motherlands — her premiere solo show at form & concept, on view through December 23 — 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).
Motherlands hopes to offer viewers a rare opportunity to traverse multiple landscapes simultaneously; emotional, intellectual, and physical realms coalesce in the artist’s constructed “womb” at the core of the installation, which funnels the audience into a small, sacred, intimate space. By re-contextualizing narratives baked into colonial cultural fabric in this constructed hideout, Hoffman brings her personal experiences with their farcical nature to our attention. The exhibition references the oceanside views of the Philippines alongside the vistas of New Mexico that have influenced both her and her mother’s cultural experiences through monumental vinyl bus-wraps. Though differences are apparent when looking at the materials individually, they collapse into each other under the weight of Hoffman’s vision and are emphasized by the multi-media paintings she is known for.
While my work deals with belonging and ancestry and connecting back to the land…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…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 US.
Camille Hoffman
Motherlands is on view at form & concept in Santa Fe, New Mexico, until December 23, 2022.
To learn more, visit formandconcept.center.
