“Among all these evolutionary achievements, perhaps none are more important, more widely used, and more highly developed, than those characters which serve to elude, to attract, or to deceive the eye, so to facilitate escape from enemies or the pursuit of prey.“ Hugh Cott

While growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I was strongly influenced by my time spent at my friend’s house in the woods. Her bedroom wall was covered with forest themed wallpaper, and her mother would frequently hunt. Deer carcasses were hung in the garage to bleed while my friend and I would run around and play. Nature was a stage for fantasy, and at the same time the location of violent and visceral realities. My work grows out of this conflation of fantasy, beauty, and brute nature.

The instinct that drives the hunt, within both humans and animals, is mysterious and universal. Crypsis by definition is the ability of an organism to avoid observation. This comes from a strong evolutionary pressure for animals to blend into their environment or conceal their shape; for prey animals to avoid predators and for predators to be able to sneak up on prey. In my current gallery installation I engage in the concealing and revealing of images through patterning and layers, weaving together images to create a camouflaged, non-linear narrative. I work in an array of media to explore this sense of hidden image, incorporating painting, printmaking, and collage into my practice.

In this installation Crypsis is functioning through the prism of a large-scale collage built from a similar wallpaper that was found in my friend’s bedroom. This two-dimensional photographic depiction of nature is treated as a found-object starting point. The wallpaper mural is cut and reconfigured, ornamented, rethought and re-imagined as a stage for a larger than life hunter. The image of the hunter within this landscape is realized through negation, large chunks taken away to create a mysterious silhouette as a negative shape on one wall. These same wallpaper remnants that have been cut from the forest are reconstituted to create a mirror inverse across the room, the hunter re-framed stark against the white wall of the gallery on the opposite wall. The artifice of the found landscape and the fakery of the camouflaged hunter both separate and converge while starring at each other across the space of the gallery and the viewer walks between the two.