Project Introduction

Camouflage Village: Persistence, Change, Sameness and Time

PROJECT DATES/TIMES: 

Saturdays from 10:00am-2:00pm, July 12-August 16, 2014

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

“Camoflage Village: Persistence, Change, Sameness and Time” is an outdoor installation for Michigan Legacy Art Park to be constructed over the summer of 2014. The inspiration for this idea has developed over the past several years as the artist has lived and traveled through northern Michigan but came into focus based on work he had been doing with the cultural architect from Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Part of Sleeping Bear Dunes is designated as the Port Oneida Rural Historic District, a collection of farms that are now until under the care of the National Park Service. For the past year, Kaz and his students from the Leelanau School have been helping to document the cultural landscape of Port Oneida. This entails picking a spot within the district, taking a GPS reading and then photographing in 360 degrees in order to map the layout of the farms and how the farms relate to each other in the landscape. Through this documentation, they are helping the Park Service in presenting visual evidence of how different ethnicities approached laying out their farms and how those farms relate to each other. This cultural interaction with the landscape is what has inspired the idea to delve into ideas of personal psyche and identifying with place.

The installation will take the form of a “shanty village” which will be camouflaged into the natural environment of the park terrain. The “shanties,” defined as small, crudely built structures will take on a variety of shapes and forms. Inspired by structures like bird houses, ice shanties, fishing shanties, wood sheds, barns and a variety of other structures readily seen through northern Michigan, these structures will serve as symbols of personal identity as that individual self-identity relates to place. In these times of growing global awareness of environmentalism, the forms of this installation will represent the struggle between the internal self and the external self.

The visual premise of this installation is to build a large number of shanty structures for installation in the wooded area you see here. The structures will be small in a reduced scale and the surfaces will be covered with drawn and painted marks that are derived from the surrounding environment and abstracted to create each structure’s camouflage.