Karin Bravin, BravinLee Offsite, curates Camille Hoffman’s site-specific Installation
IceHouse Project space, Sharon, CT.
Opening September 21 from 4-6 pm
We Sing Inside Ourselves
Camille Hoffman is a painter who critically reimagines the romantic American landscape through layered and immersive site-specific installation. Her practice re-threads misplaced histories, materials, and ancestral geographies, including that of the Philippines and the Americas, by resculpting mass-produced vinyl landscapes through handwork — collage, sewing, and painterly gesture. Through this tactile transformation, she builds sacred in-between spaces that evoke the sensory experience of moving between multiple places and identities at once. Informed by historical research, community-oriented conversations, and dreams, these spaces intend to be activated by the land they live on, the architecture that houses them, and the people who visit.
Hoffman’s site-specific installation at ICEHOUSE Project Space explores the pressurized and cyclic relationships among the earth, ice, and the human hand.
In We Sing Inside Ourselves, Hoffman reflects on the ancient glacial origins of present-day Connecticut, which first sculpted its landscape millions of years ago, together with the region’s historical trade in ice. Housed within the confines of a 12 x 12-foot historic ice house, a billowing installation of translucent icey blue-gray polyesters and patterned plastics drape from the vaulted ceiling, alluding to weeping glaciers and anti-gravitational rain cycles. From synthetic ice sheets melting upwards into strings of staggered natural clear quartz crystal beads and a rocky floor mimicking fluid waves, Hoffman asks the viewer to consider their ever-shifting orientation to time, space, and the physical planet.
ICEHOUSE Project Space opened its doors in September of 2018 with the presentation of Dan Devine’s “Inside-Out NASCAR.” This endeavor, organized by KK Kozik in an historic 18th-century icehouse on the town green in the center of Sharon, Connecticut, is a venue for site-specific projects that, in one way or another, demonstrates artists’ engagement with the specific spot where it stands.
The projects executed there, which now number 19 and whose makers include among others Mark Dion, Eric Aho, Janet Biggs, Richard Klein, Kristin Jones, Lisa Hoke and Ryan Frank, have tackled topics ranging from the iron industry of northwestern Connecticut, the decline of winged insects, native versus invasive plants, the gardens surrounding the icehouse, various utterances by William F. Buckley, Jr. (famous resident of Sharon) as well as the historic ice industry.
With each project, the investigation of a new facet of natural and historic life on Upper Main Street in Sharon transforms the icehouse from a small outbuilding into a locus of contemporary art installation.
