Queens International 2018: Volumes

Camille Hoffman. Excelsior: Ever Upward, Ever Afloat, 2018. Excelsior erosion control blanket; hurricane tarp; Ninja Turtles pool toy; Dollar Tree scenic landscape and golf course calendars; camouflage party napkins; Tiki Party decorations; Destiny inspirational poster; Lysol Clean & Fresh package; Jonah & the Whale Watchtower brochure; planet Earth beach ball; Hudson River freight ship print-out; Thanksgiving, Tropical Paradise, Frozen, Moana, Super Bowl Sunday, Dora the Explorer, Jake the Pirate, and Finding Nemo plastic tablecloths; Pioneer Supermarket, Western Beef Supermarket, Home Depot, We Care We Recycle, Thank You Thank You bodega bag, Chinatown plastic bags; aquarium liner; stretcher bars; oil and acrylic paint on plaster, wire and wood. Courtesy of the artist. Hoffman’s installation responds to the The Relief Map of the New York City Water Supply System, pictured at the center of her installation. The model dates from the 1939 World’s Fair and is on long-term loan to Queens Museum from New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection.


Camille Hoffman
In April 2018, I had the privilege of speaking with Two Clouds, a Ramapough Lenape tribal member and full-time water protector at Split Rock Sweetwater Prayer Camp in New Jersey. Preserving the language, religion, and history of his tribe, Two Clouds is especially focused on indigenous rights while actively fighting against the Pilgrim Pipeline that threatens New York and New Jersey waters. Our insightful and ongoing exchange around water as it pertains to deep cultural traditions, ancestral trade routes, and long-standing colonial violence on this land has prompted me to critically reexamine my own personal interconnection with water, consumption and transoceanic identity. Drawing from our conversations and responding to the Queens Museum’s 1939 World's Fair relief model of the New York City water supply system, I researched the colonial symbols pertaining to water and commerce emphasized in the New York state seal, ultimately reformulating them with my own found materials.
	Within the center of the New York seal, inland and foreign trade are represented by a masted sloop and ship docking on the Hudson River. In my installation, I replaced the sloop with a portrait of Two Clouds in his canoe advancing toward the viewer, and substituted the Western ship with a collaged pre-colonial Balangay "mother boat" from my maternal grandparents’ homeland in the Philippines. The various mass-produced materials I incorporated in my work were purchased from Queens hardware and dollar stores that serve primarily immigrant communities living around the museum. These materials include locally-sourced water in the form of printed plastics, party decorations, hurricane tarps and nature calendars bought in Woodside, Jackson Heights, and the Flushing neighborhood where my paternal grandfather formerly grew up during the time of the New York World’s Fair. "Excelsior", a Latin term meaning "Ever Upward", is the official motto of New York State, and is also prominently featured on the state seal, which was first adopted in 1778. Excelsior is likewise a name for a material—the thin wood shavings made typically from "clonal colonies" of aspen trees which grow in the highlands across North America. I used this material while reflecting on the political and poetic discrepancies between "Excelsior", the motto connoting invincibility, and excelsior, the organic material used for environmental preservation. These shavings, embedded within my installation, are also commonly used as packaging for fragile objects including art, erosion control for farms and gardens, filling for stuffed animals and padding for evaporative home cooling systems known as swamp coolers.

During the past four years and over the course of my many moves around New York and New Haven, I’ve found myself scouring local dollar stores in search of affordable fragments of home. The nostalgia of printed plastics that permeated the landscape of my cross-cultural childhood and continue to pervade the needs of my daily living. My identification with and dependency on these materials are inextricably linked to my memories of growing up in a working class home, while at a larger environmental scale, threaten the very water and land upon which my life depends. Living in midst of this social and environmental contradiction, my collage practice has become a ceremony of reconfiguration and critical reflection on the themes of diaspora, domesticity and disposability. In this regard, I think about volumes as both an accumulation of disparate and layered narratives, both personal and collective, and the way in which these narratives materially amount to mass.
prev	Camille Hoffman (b. 1987, Chicago, IL) earned an MFA from Yale University (2015) and a BFA from California College of the Arts (2009). She was a recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting at Yale University, and also received a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship for research in Spain, 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, in exhibitions including Pieceable Kingdom at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2018); Lincoln Center, New York, NY (2017); Times Square, New York, NY (2017); Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (2015); Nuit Blanche arts festival, Paris, France (2015); and Espai Cultural Biblioteca Azorín, Valencia, Spain (2008). Hoffman has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Wave Hill (2017), QueenSpace (2016-17), Museum of Arts and Design (2017), and Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School through the Yale University Office of New Haven and State Affairs (2015). Hoffman has worked for over a decade as an arts educator and community organizer in Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Haven, Brooklyn, and Queens. She works in Long Island City, Queens.	next
prev	next

Identity Library Milford Graves Skylight