Mossy Cloak

[floor plan]       [full publication]

Patterned Disruptions
Third Object

Camouflage is an expansive group of phenomena with distinct branches in evolutionary biology, military technology, hunting gear and fashion. Certainly, camouflage, mimicry and concealment – whether used to hide and seek or to lure by pretending to be something else – are as much a part of the natural world as the seasons are. The earliest manifestations conjure up visions of the plant Amorphophallus, whose flower exudes a strong odor of decaying meat in order to attract its pollinators, the arctic fox who conceals himself in the bright white snow(a) and the human hunter, crouching motionless behind trees as eyes search the horizon for sustenance and enemies.

It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the need for patterned concealment on a massive scale arose.1Military camouflage, whose mother is aerial reconnaissance, first entered the battlefield in 1915 during World War I. With cameras newly affixed to airplanes, recording topography after topography in light and chemicals, the militaries of Europe needed a novel perceptual technology that could give them the deception, misdirection and confusion that they needed. Although it drew on the work of evolutionary patterning, modern camouflage started as a design for machine eyes(b) not human ones.

The link between photography and reconnaissance is embodied in the life and career of Edward Steichen. Colonel Steichen spent the grueling years of the First World War as director of aerial reconnaissance operations for the United States expeditionary corps, overseeing more than eleven hundred servicemen in the establishment of photographic reconnaissance for the US.2 It was the first major military conflict in which the camera was put to the sky(c) to record the positions and movements of the armies on the ground, and this development in skybound reconnaissance required a countervailing earthly technology, one that could mask the places and plans of the troops on the ground. Steichen would go on to be instrumental in the development of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, his endeavors speeding the acceptance of photography as a medium of fine art.3

Naturally the artists of Europe were camo’s designers. Gertrude Stein recounts her first experience of camouflage with Picasso: “It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and Picasso amazed looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.”4 Stein, recognizing camouflage as “a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another,(d) immediately grasped camouflage as a visual patterning that tends toward outward expansion. While it may be obvious that the visual effect sought by camouflage is a blending between object and environment, less obvious are the ways and reasons for camouflage to extend outward from the battlefield to the civilian sphere over the century since its first application in war.

Writing in the Surrealist journal Minotaur in 1935, Roger Caillois, then a twenty-two year old aspiring sociologist, became the first to theorize the expanded implications of camouflage. For him, the evolutionary process that creates camouflage in nature is a “photography on the level of the object” in that it is a merger of surface patterning and three dimensional morphology.5 (e) The animal camouflage that visually concealed certain creatures,he argued, should be thought of as an “instinct of renunciation,” a drive in the organism toward “a mode of reduced existence” without consciousness or feeling. (f)To camouflage, in other words, is to disperse more than your visual appearance; camouflage disperses the self. Descending, as Caillois puts it, “to the bottom of matter,” the camoufleur strives to “be matter.”6

From Caillois’s point of view, this lust to become matter is a dark inner propulsion towards death. Historian and curator Michelle Puetz, by contrast, has noted that mimicry carries with it a position of deep empathy. It “opens up a tactile experience of the world in which the Cartesian categories of subject and object are not firm, but rather malleable,” a relational exchange loaded with empathetic potential.7 In 2015, one century after military camouflage was introduced on the battlefield, the true applicability of this empathetic position remains an open question. Do the horrors of war stir anywhere in the camo tote bag toter? Does the urban Realtree wearer contemplate the cycles of seasons and deployments implicit in both hunting culture and military service?

This publication serves as an extension and expansion of the ideas at play in the exhibition Mossy Cloak, with written and visual contributions from the artists in the show and other camouflage thinkers and makers. In her essay “Cute Camo,” Kelly Lloyd weighs the risks and rewards of protecting oneself with cuteness, illuminating how personality and behavior can themselves be camouflaging agents. Noah Gapsis considers how camouflage works as fashion and how fashion works as camouflage, framing this reversal in the context of the supermediated Gulf War. A parallel essay by Curt Miller documents allegiances to two camo-producing companies and the tension that exists between being consumed by a landscape and blissfully merging with one. Rashayla Marie Brown provides an autobiographical essay that contemplates the barbed relationship between subjective and institutional knowledges. Additionally, two artists in the exhibition, Timothy McMullen and Liz Ensz, reflect on their work in the show, one from a broader consideration of his painting practice, the other from a specific historical thread explored in her Mossy Cloak sculpture. Throughout are visual contributions from the artists, and also from graphic designer Eline Mul, whose optically charged designs draw from the writings of Jacques Lacan, Ralph Ellison and Hannah Arendt. Together, these artists and writers draw out the interwoven vocabularies of camouflage, revealing what goes hidden in these patterns of concealment.

(a) Culling his forms from the many strata of advertising, graffiti and graffiti removal in the city, Timothy McMullen’s gestures represent fleeting moments in a constantly evolving landscape. In his white on white paintings in Mossy Cloak, the figure and ground dissolve into one another. His loose brushstrokes are barely visible; they only appear through the highlight and shadow produced by the liquid wrinkled page, puckering in the wake of his wet paintbrush. The works act as hyperlow relief sculpture by using the material depth of the paper to define their content. return

(b) Two distinct series by photographer Laura Hart Newlon are represented in Mossy Cloak, one depicting studio-based still lifes, the other analog-digital photo collages. In all of these images, Newlon heightens our awareness of the photographic construction of space, using, for instance, a zone of pure white in a picture as both a staunch flat surface and an infinitely receding space. Elsewhere, depth in the image is indicated only with the visual distortion of a chintz textile pattern as it slopes from one axis to another. In her Incantation Artifact series, Newlon draws houseplant imagery from vintage home and garden magazines, collaging together the clippings and then further modifying in Photoshop. Like the camoufleur, Newlon attacks the idea of the edge, scrambling our ability to maintain a grasp on what we observe. return

(c) Liz Ensz stitches dichotomies together. Her work in sculpture, fiber and printmaking, often revolving around notions of American space, confronts dualities like accumulation and waste, protrusion and recession, cloaking and revealing. She approaches camouflage with a range of historical interests, including the gendered space of camo textile production, the relationship between aerial reconnaissance photography and the sublime imaging of the American West, and technological detritus in all its metaphorical dimensions. By conflating the formally similar aerial views of tiered strip mines and terraced landfills, she seduces us into gazing at our own cavernous, mountainous waste. return

(d) One early solution for the problem of concealing the gigantic battleships of World War I was to not hide them at all. Dazzle camouflage, also called parti-colour, consisted of bold, high contrast stripes interlocking in cubistic messes with the intention of preventing accurate visual assessment of size, speed, and direction. Samantha Bittman’s paintings achieve the same kind of optical discombobulation, confusing the clarity of the picture plane. Each painting consists of two coinciding images, one the weave of the canvas itself, the other painted on this woven surface, utilizing the physical structure of the fibers to direct the depicted forms. With the pixel acting as the basic unit in woven textile production, her paintings’ surfaces oscillate between painted and woven pattern, at once revealing and masking the binary structure underneath. return

(e) Kiam Marcelo Junio and Najee-Zaid Searcy’s collaborative sound piece stems from Kiam’s ongoing project Camouflage as a Metaphor for Passing in which their critique and exploration of Filipino identity expands the conversation of the American military in the Pacific. Using the disruptive and disorienting concept of dazzle camouflage as a framework for their piece, the two channel work meditates on simultaneity and dualism. The piece begins with the artist chanting “Nangyayari Na,” a Tagalog phrase meaning “it’s already happening.” In the artist’s words, Nangyayari Na “posits that time itself is infinitely expansive and at the same time, compressed into the phenomenological experience of the present. All of history, all that’s to come, and all that is possible is already here. And what is already happening is existence, is the present moment, is the connectivity inherent in matter and anti-matter. simultaneously compress and expand one’s perception of time and space.” return

(f) Drew Broderick’s practice is at once expansive and casual, using a combination of humor, irony, and found objects to launch a critique of the militarized leisure economy in Hawai‘i. With his wallpaper installation in Mossy Cloak, Broderick splices together the dazzle camouflage that was important to early 20th century naval activity, the pixelated U.S. military camouflage of the post- Gulf War era, and the exoticizing kitch of aloha shirt textiles. The work suggests that the “Hawaiian shirt” garb of the tourist is a kind of behavioral camouflage, one that links the wearer to past modes of adapting to the radical, colonized otherness of the Pacific. As the artist has said of camouflage and aloha shirts, “historical narratives of colonialism, tourism, the native, oppression and joy can be read out of these materials.” return


1. Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Six Words About Helen Mirra, or the Six Basic Factors of Camouflage,” Formalismus catalog (Hamburg: Kunstverein Hamburg, 2004).
2. Gary E. Weir, “Photographer Pioneered Aerial Reconnaissance ‘For the Lives of Men.” Pathfinder, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, (May/ June, 2007), 29-30, p. 29.
3. Two of his most popular and expansive photography exhibitions at MoMA were Family of Man and Power in the Pacific. See Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October, Vol. 22, (Autumn, 1982), pp. 27-63.
4. Gertrude Stein, Picasso, (London: Dover, 1984 [1938]), p. 11.
5. Roger Caillois, “Mimesis and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October, Vol. 31, (Winter, 1984 [First published in Minotaur, vol. 7, 1935]), 17-32, p. 23.
6. Ibid., 31.
7. Michelle Puetz, “University of Chicago Theories of Media, Keywords Glossary: Mimesis.” (http:// csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/mimesis.htm).

 Artists & Works

Samantha Bittman
Samantha Bittman lives and works in Chicago, IL. Bittman received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Bittman also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Number Cruncher at Longhouse Projects, New York, and Razzle Dazzle at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at art fairs in Miami, Mexico City, and Chicago. She is included in numerous private and public collections.
Untitled, 2015
Acrylic on handwoven textile
20 x 16 inches

Untitled, 2015
Acrylic on handwoven textile
20 x 16 inches


Drew Broderick
Drew Broderick lives and works in Honolulu, Hawaii. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2011 with degrees in Biology and Studio Art. Broderick currently runs SPF Projects, a venue for contemporary art in Honolulu.
Wallpaper, 2015 Wallpaper
108 x 174 inches


Liz Ensz
Liz Ensz was born in Minnesota to a resourceful family of penny-savers, metal scrappers, and curators of cast-offs. She received her BFA in Fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ensz is a founding collective member of The Visitor Center Artist Camp, a DIY arts testing ground in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Mountain’s Memory, 2015
Silkscreen on nylon, cardboard, glue, grommets, trace elements

Sculpture: 60 x 44 x 60 inches

Prints: 6 x 12 inches


Kiam Marcelo Junio
Kiam Marcelo Junio is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist creating work through various media, including but not limited to, photography, video, performance (blending butoh, drag and burlesque), sculpture, installation and culinary arts. Their research and art practice centers around queer identities, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, post/colonialist Asian American tropes and stereotypes, military power dynamics, the politics of personal agency, and social justice through collaborative practices and healing modalities. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy. They were born in the Philippines, and have lived in the US, Japan and Spain.
with Najee-Zaid Searcy

Dazzle I and II (Nanyayari Na Suite), 2015
Two channel sound installation
15:00 minutes, looped


Tim McMullen
Timothy McMullen is a Chicago resident. He received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2014. His site specific installations, paintings and drawings explore the intersection between the fabricated space of painting and the real world site that serves as inspiration. In 2013, he was an artist in residence at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck Michigan. McMullen has exhibited his work at Robert Bills Contemporary, Chicago; Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago; and numerous solo and group shows in Los Angeles.
24 Versions, 2015
Acrylic on paper
84 x 180 inches

Trying to Appear, 2015
Acrylic on drywall
84 x 144 inches


Laura Hart Newlon
Laura Hart Newlon is a Seattle-based artist working with (and among) objects, images and the residue of contemporary culture. Newlon has recently exhibited at Studio 424, Chicago; the Baltimore Alternative Art Fair, Baltimore; LVL3, Chicago; Johalla Projects, Chicago; and ADDS DONNA, Chicago. Formerly a cultural anthropologist, Newlon received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.
Incantation Artifact VIII, 2014
Archival inkjet print
13 x 20 inches

Incantation Artifact VI, 2014
Archival inkjet print
13 x 20 inches

Untitled (Registration), 2013
Archival inkjet print
40 x 30 inches

Untitled (Plumb Line), 2013
Archival inkjet print
50 x 40 inches

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